Give Your Work a Permanent Home

Everything on this site is archived on a service called Zenodo. If you've never heard of it: Zenodo is a free, open archive operated by CERN — yes, the physics lab — built so that anyone's work can be preserved and cited. Not just professors. Anyone. No fees, no gatekeepers, no application. And every deposit gets a DOI — a permanent identifier that scholars use to cite work, that never breaks, and that will outlive this website, your hard drive, and most institutions.

Here's the whole process, from someone who has done it more than a few times.

1. Make an account. Go to zenodo.org and sign up. Free, takes two minutes.

2. Finish your document first. Make a clean PDF. Put a proper title page on it: title, your name, a version number (start with “Version 1.0”), the date, and a license line. This matters more than it seems — the PDF is what people download, so it should identify itself.

3. Start a New Upload and drag in your PDF.

4. Fill in the form. Resource type (for written work, “Preprint” or “Publication”). Title. Your name as author. A description — this is your abstract, the paragraph people read before deciding to download. Keywords, entered one at a time — these are how strangers find you. And a license: I use Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which means anyone may read and share your work as long as they credit you.

5. Know this before you press Publish: it's permanent. Once published, the files can never be changed or deleted — that permanence is exactly what makes a DOI trustworthy. Read your PDF one last time, end to end. If you find a mistake later, you don't panic and you don't delete: you upload a corrected file as a new version, and Zenodo keeps both, honestly labeled.

6. Publish. Your DOI appears immediately. That string — it looks like 10.5281/zenodo.1234567 — is your work's permanent address. Put it on your website, your résumé, anywhere. Anyone, anywhere, forever, can find your work with it.

7. One nuance worth knowing: you actually get two DOIs. One points to the exact version you just published; the other — Zenodo calls it the concept DOI — always points to the latest version. Share the concept DOI when you want people to always land on your newest revision. It's the difference between citing a snapshot and citing the living work.

That's it. Fifteen minutes, zero dollars, and your ideas have a citable, permanent existence that no one can take down or quietly edit. For the finer details, Zenodo's own documentation is short and good — linked below.

The bar for serious work never moved. But the door to the archive is standing wide open. Walk in.