Using Zenodo as a Discovery and Publishing Platform

We are 25 years into the World Wide Web revolution. While Humanities researchers have been at the forefront of many uses of networked communication to disseminate their research, they have lagged other disciplines in their adoption of formal discovery and organisational tools (Spiro, 2016; Borgman, 2009; Anderson et al., 2012). Some of the core tools that characterise current best practice in other disciplines—ORCID, DOIs, discipline-wide repositories, mega and overlay journals—have seen slow or limited adoption in the case of Humanities researchers. Data Management and Citation practices tend to be less well-developed and widely practi
s
ed in the Humanities than in other areas. Humanities publishing, too, especially scholar-led publishing, still commonly involves less than optimal practice—custom, project-held URLs, storage on private/commercial data servers, a lack of formal attention to versioning, backups, and long-term preservation (Copland et al., 2016).

This poster shows how two projects at the University of Lethbridge are addressing these long-standing problems through the use of OpenAIRE/Zenodo (the final form of the poster is O’Donnell et al., 2018). In one case, the project is looking for an open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) method of publishing project data—a small (by cross-disciplinary standards) set of 2D and 3D images and point clouds, annotations, and textual transcriptions involving medieval cultural and textual heritage. The goal here is to establish an expansible repository that will allow for non-negotiated additions and reuse by external projects and survive and remain citable long after the originating project has concluded and funding has run out.
The second is the publication platform for a graduate-student run journal. In this case, the students needed a platform that would provide their early career authors with some guarantee of permanent archiving and discoverability while recognising and accommodating the inherently unstable nature of a graduate-student run editorial board: while this year’s board is enthusiastic about the project, we have no way of guaranteeing that this will be true of future generations of graduate students.
Although other options exist to solve both these problems, our poster demonstrates the degree to which OpenAIRE/Zenodo provides an extremely simple and durable platform for ensuring the long-term discoverability and preservation of Humanities research in these common use cases.

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