A new EU-funded project, HORIZON-ZEN Plus (grant agreement 101256740), is adding AI-assisted curation, metadata, and discovery tools to the EU Open Research Repository hosted on Zenodo. Coordinated by CERN, the project runs from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2027 with a total EU contribution of €799,472.50, funded under Horizon Europe’s HORIZON.4.2 strand (Reforming and enhancing the European R&I system). It is registered on CORDIS, the European Commission’s official project database, and documented on Zenodo’s own project page.
For research administrators and data stewards who advise investigators on where to deposit EU-funded outputs, this is worth tracking: it is a direct, funded upgrade to infrastructure that a large share of Horizon Europe-funded data and software already flows through.
What the EU Open Research Repository is
The EU Open Research Repository is a dedicated community space within Zenodo — the general-purpose, CERN-operated repository built on the open-source InvenioRDM platform — set up specifically to give beneficiaries of EU research programmes a compliant, no-cost place to deposit datasets, software, publications, and other outputs and satisfy Horizon Europe’s open-access and FAIR obligations. It was established through the original HORIZON-ZEN project (2023–2025, grant agreement 101122956, also CERN-coordinated), which built the repository’s initial deposit workflows and branding. HORIZON-ZEN+ is the follow-on project that operates and extends it.
What HORIZON-ZEN+ adds
Per its CORDIS objective and Zenodo’s own project description, HORIZON-ZEN+ organizes its work around two problems: making data curation scalable and cost-effective as deposit volume grows, and making high-quality datasets easier to discover and reuse — including for AI training and research. The planned work includes:
- AI-assisted curation and support automation: self-service handling of standard support requests, AI assistance on certain curation and submission-review tasks, and more advanced automated curation checks on incoming deposits.
- Enhanced deposit and discovery workflows: support for data-packaging formats suited to AI-training datasets, automated subject classification, geospatial metadata support, and new citation-metric integrations in Zenodo’s search and discovery features.
- AI-ready metadata: incorporating AI-specific metadata and data-packaging standards intended to make datasets more directly reusable across disciplines, not just findable.
- Interoperability: deeper integration with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) EU Node and with the Open Research Europe publishing platform, so a deposit surfaces consistently across EU open-science infrastructure rather than living only inside Zenodo’s own interface.
Because the improvements are being built into InvenioRDM itself — Zenodo’s underlying open-source platform, also used by other repositories such as CaltechDATA and several national repositories — the project frames sustainability and broad reuse of the tooling beyond Zenodo alone as an explicit goal, not just a Zenodo-specific feature rollout.
What this means for research administrators
None of this changes where Horizon Europe grant holders should deposit data today — the EU Open Research Repository on Zenodo remains the recommended no-cost option for beneficiaries without access to a discipline-specific or institutional repository that meets Horizon Europe’s requirements. What HORIZON-ZEN+ signals is a two-year investment in making that path lower-friction: faster curation turnaround via automation, richer automated metadata (useful when reviewing a data management plan against what was actually deposited), and better cross-linking with EOSC and Open Research Europe, which matters for institutions tracking compliance and output visibility across EU-funded projects. If your institution advises PIs on Horizon Europe FAIR data management plans, it is worth flagging to data-management-plan reviewers that deposit and curation workflows on Zenodo’s EU repository are actively changing over the 2025–2027 window, and that specific feature timing should be checked against Zenodo’s own release notes and the HORIZON-ZEN+ project page rather than assumed from this overview, since CORDIS and Zenodo had not yet published a detailed public deliverables timeline as of this writing.
Frequently asked questions
Is HORIZON-ZEN+ a new repository, separate from Zenodo?
No. It is a project that funds development work on the existing EU Open Research Repository, which is a community/collection within Zenodo itself, not a separate platform. Researchers continue to deposit through Zenodo.
Who runs HORIZON-ZEN+?
CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) coordinates the project, consistent with its role operating Zenodo more broadly since Zenodo’s 2013 launch.
Does HORIZON-ZEN+ change Horizon Europe’s data-deposit or FAIR requirements?
No. It is infrastructure and tooling investment, not a policy change. Horizon Europe’s underlying open-access and FAIR data obligations for beneficiaries are unaffected; what changes is the tooling available for meeting them via the EU Open Research Repository.
Where can I check current project status?
The authoritative sources are the project’s CORDIS fact sheet and its Zenodo project page, both maintained by the project’s own coordinator and funder.
