Written and maintained by CASRAI Editorial Board
Last updated
Zenodo is a free, general-purpose research repository, built and operated by CERN and OpenAIRE, that accepts datasets, software, publications, posters, presentations, and other research outputs from any academic discipline. It launched in May 2013 as part of the OpenAIRE project, which the European Commission commissioned to give EC-funded researchers a “catch-all” repository regardless of field or home institution. Every deposit is assigned an automatically minted, citable DOI, and Zenodo places no restriction on subject matter, format, or licence — which is why it is commonly recommended as a fallback option when a researcher’s field has no discipline-specific repository of its own, including to help satisfy funder data-sharing mandates such as the NIH’s.
Last verified 2026-08-25 against Zenodo’s own documentation (about.zenodo.org, help.zenodo.org) and OpenAIRE’s Zenodo service factsheet.
What Zenodo Accepts
Per Zenodo’s own about page, the repository “does not impose any requirements on format, size, access restrictions or licence,” and welcomes “data, software and other artefacts in support of publications,” as well as “materials associated with the conferences, projects or the institutions themselves.” In practice this spans raw datasets, analysis code and software releases, preprints and postprints, posters, presentations, negative results, and project or administrative records — across every field, not just the particle physics research CERN itself conducts.
That openness is unlimited in subject matter and format, but not in storage: each record ships with a default storage quota of 50GB, and depositors can request an additional allowance of up to 150GB beyond that for larger datasets, per Zenodo’s current storage-quota documentation. No separate hard per-file size cap is published beyond that record-level quota.
How DOI Minting and Versioning Work
Zenodo automatically registers a DOI — through the registration agency DataCite, under the prefix 10.5281 — for every record once it is published; a depositor can also reserve a DOI in advance to embed it in the files themselves before publishing. When someone uploads a new version of an existing record, Zenodo creates a new, separate record with its own metadata, files, and DOI, linked to every other version of the same work. Since Zenodo’s DOI-versioning scheme launched in 2017, each version carries both a version-specific DOI — which always resolves to that exact set of files — and a shared “concept DOI,” which resolves to the landing page of whichever version is currently newest. The concept DOI is the one to cite when referring to a dataset or piece of software in an evolving, version-agnostic sense.
Archiving Software Releases from GitHub
Zenodo’s GitHub integration lets a depositor connect a GitHub account, enable a specific repository, and have Zenodo automatically archive a new record — complete with its own DOI — every time a new release is tagged on GitHub. Metadata for the archived release can be supplied through a CITATION.cff file or a .zenodo.json file in the repository, and Zenodo also mirrors archived software into Software Heritage for long-term preservation. As of this writing, that native release-archiving integration is documented for GitHub only; Zenodo’s own help pages describe no equivalent automatic integration for GitLab, so releases from a GitLab-hosted project need to be uploaded to Zenodo manually.
Zenodo and Funder Data-Sharing Mandates
Because it accepts any discipline and any format at no cost, Zenodo is one of the standard answers when a funder’s data-sharing policy requires a repository but a researcher’s field has no natural discipline-specific home for the data. Zenodo is a listed participant in the NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) and publishes its own element-by-element guidance for completing an NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan. It also maintains dedicated guidance for the European Commission’s Horizon Europe open-research requirements and documents an “EU Open Research Repository” collection within Zenodo for Horizon-funded outputs. Neither relationship makes Zenodo mandatory for any given award — researchers should still confirm their own funder’s and institution’s specific requirements — but both make it a defensible, funder-recognized default when no better-fit repository exists.
Cost
Zenodo does not charge depositors or users. OpenAIRE’s own service factsheet for Zenodo describes it as “free to upload and free to access,” and the platform is funded directly by CERN, OpenAIRE, and the European Commission rather than through subscriptions, deposit fees, or paywalled access.
How Zenodo Compares to Other Generalist Repositories
Zenodo is not the only general-purpose option, and the right choice depends on what a researcher already has and needs. CASRAI’s Zenodo vs. Figshare comparison covers the tradeoff against Figshare’s more polished institutional and publisher tooling; Zenodo vs. Dryad covers the tradeoff against Dryad’s curated, journal-integrated review process; and Zenodo vs. OSF covers the difference between Zenodo as an archival deposit repository and OSF as an active project workspace that can also archive to a DOI. For the broader landscape of research data management practice — repository selection, DMPs, and preservation standards — see CASRAI’s Research Data Management hub.
