From osgeo at peterloewe.com  Mon Jun 15 03:21:02 2026
From: osgeo at peterloewe.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Peter_L=C3=B6we_OSGeo?=)
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:21:02 +0200
Subject: [Incubator] Proposal to add FAIRness to the incubation process
Message-ID: <92e2a82e062fc249eb639c4ba27eb9b6@peterloewe.com>

Hello Incubation Committee,

I propose that we should consider to update the current incubation 
process for the FAIR principles, especially regarding persistent digital 
identifiers (DOI for code) and long term archiving of code repositories 
by Open Access repositories.

The acronym FAIR stands for _F_indability, _A_ccessability, 
_I_nteroperability and _R_eusability of geospatial software repositories 
and data.

I am raising this topic now, as scientific publishers are changing their 
best practices for citation of software, to "DOI-based code citation is 
required": URLs pointing to GitHub-code repos are becoming deprecated.

Examples:

- Open access publishing platform of the European Commission:
https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/for-authors/data-guidelines/#softwarecode

- WILEY (American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Union Japan, etc.): 
https://www.agu.org/publications/authors/journals/data-software-for-authors#citation

- Copernicus (Open Access for the European Geoscience  Union): 
https://publications.copernicus.org/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html

- Springer Nature: 
https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-science/code-policy


A growing number of OSGeo projects has already adopted FAIR practices in 
addition to graduating from the OSGeo incubation process: Geopaparazzi, 
GEOS, GeoServer, GeoTools, GDAL, GMT, GRASS, gvSig, istSOS, Leaflet, 
Mapbender, MapServer, MOSS, movingpandas, Orfeo Toolbox, pdal, 
pgRouting, PostGIS, PROJ, pygeoapi, pygile-plus QGIS, rasdaman, Wradlib, 
Zoo

Detailed technical how-to info for project maintainers lives in the 
OSGeo wiki: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DOI


These two questions could be added to the project graduation checklist 
(https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Project_Graduation_Checklist#Open):

<new>
[open 3]: Open Access Repository: "Has the project established or 
planned a strategy for long-term preservation and open access 
distribution of project artifacts (e.g., releases, documentation, 
datasets) using a trusted open access repository (e.g., Zenodo, 
Figshare, or other OSGeo-approved platforms)?"

[open 4]:  Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) "Does the project utilize or 
plan to adopt persistent identifiers (PIDs) for contributors (e.g., 
ORCID) and software releases (e.g., DOIs via Zenodo or other PID 
registries) to ensure proper attribution and machine-readable citation?"
</new>


The FAIR score for software projects can be measured with the Automated 
FAIR Data Assessment Toolkit (F-UJI): https://www.f-uji.net/index.php

To see for yourselves, enter these DOI/URL into F-UHI:

1) QGIS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20444851

2) GDAL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20083023

3) A random propietary GIS: 
https://doc.esri.com/en/arcgis-pro/latest/get-started/download-arcgis-pro.html

I expect that dding FAIRness to the incubation process will ensure that 
the OSGeo projects stay up to date, receive due scientific credit and 
public visibility.


Best,
Peter