Towards OSGeo best practices for scientific software citation: Integration options for persistent identifiers in OSGeo project repositories

Abstract

As a contribution to the currently ongoing larger effort to establish Open Science as best practices in academia, this article focuses on the Open Source and Open Access tiers of the Open Science triad and community software projects. The current situation of research software development and the need to recognize it as a significant contribution to science is introduced in relation to Open Science. The adoption of the Open Science paradigms occurs at different speeds and on different levels within the various fields of science and crosscutting software communities. This is paralleled by the emerging of an underlying futuresafe technical infrastructure based on open standards to enable proper recognition for published articles, data, and software. Currently the number of journal publications about research software remains low in comparison to the amount of research code published on various software repositories in the WWW. Because common standards for the citation of software projects (containers) and versions of software are lacking, the FORCE11 group and the CodeMeta project recommending to establish Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), together with suitable metadata setss to reliably cite research software. This approach is compared to the best practices implemented by the OSGeo Foundation for geospatial community software projects. For GRASS GIS, a OSGeo project and one of the oldest geospatial open source community projects, the external requirements for DOI-based software citation are compared with the projects software documentation standards. Based on this status assessment, application scenarios are derived, how OSGeo projects can approach DOI-based software citation, both as a standalone option and also as a means to foster open access journal publications as part of reproducible Open Science.