Open Access Publishing Made Easy for Conferences

Are you tired of how conference proceedings are currently published? Zenodo.org, created by OpenAIRE and CERN, and supported by the European Commission, now offers functionality that can help. The research community can now publish, preserve, cite and make their conference material (slides, posters, videos, white papers, reports) readily available using Zenodo, so that it lives within the academic reference and metrics system.

The CfA Library, working with CERN, the HITRAN group, and NASA ADS, have put together the following workflow and guide on how to publish your conference material and make it available in the NASA ADS. If you are interested in extending this method to other subject repositories beyond the ADS, we encourage you to get in touch with info@zenodo.org.

To start, visit Zenodo.org and create an account (or sign into an account you have previously created). When creating the account, you should decide whether you will be managing the conference submissions as a group or individually. For a group, consider using a shared group email to aide in managing email messages from Zenodo and the overall curation workflow.

Next, create a new community https://zenodo.org/communities/new/ to manage your conference material submissions. Then add an identifier, title and description using the example below.

See the following examples for additional guidance on Curation Policy and Page information:

• FP7 DEVOTES Project
• American Chemical Science Journal

Once you are done creating your community, obtain the “Upload URL” that is presented, e.g. http://zenodo.org/deposit/?c=<your conference short name here>. You will provide this URL to authors submitting material to your conference. Alternatively, authors can navigate to the community’s “Collection URL”, e.g. http://zenodo.org/collection/<your conference short name here>, and use the blue upload button found there.

When sending out the “Upload URL” to authors, provide instructions on what conference metadata should be included in the record. For examples, see Kelle Cruz’s BDExoCon letter to authors and the 13th HITRAN Database Conference that was held in June 2014 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

Second, we recommend that authors submit their primary file as a PDF if they wish to take advantage of Zenodo’s preview options, see below:

Third, provide the authors with session and part information for their submission (see screenshot below). For instance, order by place in the conference abstract book or agenda. This information will also be used to order the submissions in the Zenodo community view. 

It is important that authors be certain about the file(s) they wish to submit beforehand. To be safe, there is a save option that can be utilized before final submission. Authors have full control over the metadata for the record(s) post submission but must contact info@zenodo.org if they wish to correct their file(s) post submission.

Zenodo includes features of note including MathJax (i.e. LaTex) support and reference parsing for inclusion in the NASA ADS. If you wish to use mathematics in TeX, scientific symbols, special characters in your description, make certain to use the buttons in the top right corner (starting with ∑) , when adding your description.

For references in your Zenodo record to be parsed properly by the NASA ADS, add the references in the corresponding field and separate them line by line. See the example below for formatting guidance:

Authors will have the option of choosing a license for their work. The default is Open Access and Creative Commons Attribution which was used in the 13th HITRAN Database Conference example above.

As the manager of the community, it is important to note that you will be receiving messages (at the email you provided for your account) asking you whether you approve of the author submissions. In case you miss some of these messages, you can also view the submissions awaiting for approval at the “Curation URL”, e.g. http://zenodo.org/search?cc=<your conference short name here>. You must approve the author submissions so that they can be included and appear in the community you created. Once you have received all submissions, you can provide the “Harvesting URL” to the NASA ADS (ads@cfa.harvard.edu), e.g. http://zenodo.org/oai2d?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=<your conference short name here>. Note, please allow time for the records to be reviewed and made accessible in the ADS. For reference purposes, the “Harvesting URL”, along with the other URLs previously mentioned can be accessed at https://zenodo.org/communities/edit/<your conference short name here>. 

That’s it!