[OpenGeoscience] Future of Open Geoscience Committee / OSGeo Best practices for persitent identifers

[Peter Löwe]

Dear Open Geoscience list,
 
I hope everybody is doing well and is in good health.
 
In 2021, we had only a limited number of topics being discussed in our group. Because of this, I would like to question whether the mission of the OSGeo Open Geoscience Committee should be updated. In the past years, additional discussion groups have sprung up both for the “science”-  and “coding”-aspects of the discussion. Examples for this include working groups within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), the community of research software engineers and FORCE11.
 
I still believe that OSGeo should have a strong voice in the current developments, should actively participate in the development of new standards and should push for their implementation in modern Science.
 
One hands-on on example is the rise of persistent digital identifiers for scientific citation: In the last year, the integration of such identifiers, namely Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) with software repositories was significantly improved. It is now technically feasible to give due scientific credit to all persons involved, including first authors, coders, maintainers and others. This has already been adopted by a number of OSGeo- or OSGeo-related projects:
 
MOSS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5140319
GRASS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5559460
GMT: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4900001
RasDaMan: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1040170
OSGeoLive (DOI minting under discussion by PSC)
 
This is all new, exciting and open for interpretation as standards and best practices begin to emerge.
 
Since the Open Geoscience list represents the interface between the OSGeo communities and Geosciences, I would like to kick off a discussion regarding what kind of best practices should be staked out regarding the use of DOI within OSGeo.
Anybody interested to take on this topic ?
 
One thought coming immediately to mind is whether this is an opportunity to link project DOI with OSGeo video DOI from all the FOSS4G recordings maintained at TIBs Open Access Repository for scientific video. This could be greatly improve the reuse and visiblity of FOSS4G conference presentations.
 
  
Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year,
Peter
 
<peter.loewe at gmx.de>