Osgeo, Persistent Identifiers and the Shape of Things to Come

Abstract

Abstract. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is an international community, which maintains and develops a growing number of quality-assured open source geospatial software tools. OSGeo supports Open Science and the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. The open source software projects of OSGeo are drivers for innovation, but also benefit from technical advances made in other fields to foster FAIR. We report on the of adoption of persistent identifiers (PID) by OSGeo communities, which is accelerating and diversifying. Persistent referencing by PID was introduced to OSGeo for scientific video in 2014. Since 2017 it is being adopted by a growing number of OSGeo software projects to enable scientific citation of software repositories, individuals software releases and involved persons. This enables tangible scientific credit for OSGeo volunteer work and is expected to affect OSGeo workflows, such as the incubation and graduation process. For illustration, examples from the OSGeo projects GRASS GIS and actinia are provided.