CERN leads project to make EU scientific data more accessible

The EU-funded HORIZON-ZEN+ project is developing AI tools to improve the increasingly popular EU Open Research Repository

By Thomas Brent

Sharing research data openly is transforming science, but it comes with challenges. Since 2021, EU-funded projects have been required to make their data FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The EU Open Research Repository (EOR Repository) was created through the HORIZON-ZEN project with this in mind and provides a dedicated space on Zenodo for data from EU-funded projects. This makes it easier for researchers to both disseminate their data and find project results in an efficient way. To date, over 2700 EU-funded projects have joined the repository, with over 150 000 records uploaded. 

But the repository is a victim of its own success, requiring more human capital to describe and prepare data for upload and keep records findable as it grows. To help manage this, the two-year HORIZON-ZEN+ project  was launched in October 2025, building on its predecessor with the aim of drawing on artificial intelligence (AI) to improve data curation tools, automate workflows and improve interfaces for depositing and finding information…