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In an ideal research world, any scientific content should be citable and the coherent content, as well as the citation itself, should be persistent. However, today's scientists do not only produce traditional research papers -they produce comprehensive digital resources and collections. TIB's mission is to develop a supportive framework for a sustainable access to such digital content -focusing on areas of engineering as well as architecture, chemistry, information technology, mathematics and physics. The term digital content comprises all digitally available resources such as audiovisual media, databases, texts, images, spreadsheets, digital lab journals, multimedia, 3D objects, statistics and software code.In executing this mission, TIB provides services for the management of digital content during ongoing and for finished research. This includes:• a technical and administrative infrastructure for indexing, cataloguing, DOI registration and licensing for text and digital objects, namely the TIB DOI registration which is active since 2005, • the administration of the ORCID DE consortium, an institutional network fostering the adoption of ORCID across academic institutions in Germany, • training and consultancy for data management, complemented with a digital repository for the deposition and provision of accessible, traceable and citable research data (RADAR), • a Research and Development Department where innovative projects focus on the visualization and the sustainable access to digital information, and • the development of a supportive framework within the German research data community which accompanies the life cycle of scientific knowledge generation and transfer. Its goal is to harmonize (meta)data display and exchange primarily on a national level (LEIBNIZ DATA project).

The South African Weather Service (SAWS) operates a radar station network, providing data continuity back to 1994, which is unique for southern Africa. The Geographical Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) GIS was introduced to the SAWS "Meteorological Systems and Technology" (METSYS) radar research center in 1999 where it is still used for meteorologic research. The predominantly convective nature of precipitation in southern Africa creates a public demand for severe weather information systems for convective cells. Such a system was set up in GRASS GIS, using rule-based expert systems to classify convective clouds. It isolates storm cells from stacks of reflectivity fields and derives information about their development stages. This data is both archived and also used to send out customised messages to target groups in specific areas of interest. Further, nationwide HTML-maps can be created, serving as an interactive front-end for a web-based weather information system. This service can also be made accessible from remote locations by broadcasting it as a datastream from satellite through the Worldspace digital radio system.

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<p>We report on the current status of the software repository of the Map Overlay and Statistical System (MOSS) and upcoming actions to ensure long term preservation of the codebase as a historic geospatial source. MOSS is the earliest known open source Geographic Information System (GIS). Active development of the vector-based interactive GIS by the U.S. Department of Interior began in 1977 on a CDC mainframe computer located at Colorado State University. Development continued until 1985 with MOSS being ported to multiple platforms, including DG-AOS, UNIX, VMS and Microsoft DOS. Many geospatial programming techniques and functionalities were first implemented in MOSS, including a fully interactive user interface and integrated vector and raster processing. The public availability of the WWW in the early 1990s sparked a growth of new Open Source GIS projects, which led to the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The goal of OSGeo is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. This includes best practices for project management and repositories for codebases. From its start, OSGeo recognised MOSS as the original forerunner project. After the decline of active use of MOSS since the 1990s, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) continued to provide the open source MOSS codebase on an FTP-Server, which allowed use, analysis and reference by URL. This service was discontinued at some point before 2018, which was eventually discovered due to a broken URL link. This led to a global search and rescue effort among the OSGeo communities to track down remaining offline copies of the codebase. In mid 2020 a surviving copy of the MOSS codebase was discovered at the University of Latvia, which is temporarily preserved at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin). OSGeo has agreed to make MOSS the first OSGeo Heritage Project to ensure long term preservation in a OSGeo code repository. This is a significant first step to enable MOSS-related research based on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) paradigm. Follow up actions will be required to enable scientific citation and credit by persistent identifiers for code and persons, such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative-ID (ORCID-ID) within the OSGeo repository environment. This will advance the OSGeo portfolio of best practices also for other open geospatial projects.</p><p> </p>