[QGIS-Developer] DOI for QGIS project / Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics / Deadline January 20

[Peter Löwe]

Dear QGIS Board, dear QGIS Developers,

this is very gentle reminder following up to my mail to the QGIS Board from last week (see below): The deadline to include a DOI for QGIS in the Springer Handbook of Geographic Information is coming up on Thursday. I just want to make sure that all software projects covered in the Open Source chapter can make an informed decision whether they want to have their DOI referenced in the Handbook. Otherwise, the project URL will be used for reference.

Currently the second Edition of the Springer Handbook for Geographic Information (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-72680-7) is being finalised.

QGIS is covered in the chapter on Open Source GIS (thanks to the volunteer work of Marco Hubentobler !). Neither the Editors nor the Authors receive any pay from Springer for their work and won't benefit from the volumes sold.    

Recently, new workflows for scientific citation of software projects are becoming state of the art. This includes references by persistent digital object identifiers (DOI) to software projects instead of URLs. DOI have several benefits over URLs, the biggest advantage for this community might be that DOI-based references allow to give due credit to the whole project team, including first authors, developers, but also maintainers and people in other roles.

The Springer Handbook will be around for at least five, maybe ten years. One reason for DOI (which will keep pointing to the latest QGIS release, and maybe more up to date content (see #5 below) is to give added value to the readers and not to bog them down with obsolete information.

Until now, eight OSGeo projects will have their DOI referenced in the Open Source Chapter, while six more are in the process to register their DOI, hopefully before Thursday (details here: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DOI)

The QGIS community can of course register a DOI whenever it decides to do so. 

Some reasons for DOI for the QGIS community might be:

1) Little effort, no cost and significant benefits for everybody who's involved in QGIS and can use scientific credit for their careers (-> students, early career scientists, people on tenure track).
2) preservation of all code releases in an open access long term repository (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenodo), free of charge and effortless for the project community (bzw: NASA is also using this approach for their data publishing: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/collaborate/doi-process)
3) Reference by DOI is the way to go when citing anything with a long list of authors/committers: QGIS has about _1001_ committers according to GitHub, that's a lot.
4) When ORCIDs (https://orcid.org/) for persons serving as developers, maintainers, etc. are included into the committer - metadata (GitHub-sided), the DOI workflows will pick this up and will add due credit by reference to their citation lists.
5) DOI can be used to link information, inclduing video recordings and presentations. Videos from FOSS4G events can now be linked to software project DOI and vice versa (and also linked to ORCIDs of real people), like this one: Dobias, Martin: State of QGIS 3D, QGIS ACoruña Conference 2019. https://doi.org/10.5446/40791

Registering a DOI for software projects takes only a few minutes and is described here:
- Howto mit Screenshots: https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/citeyourcode
- Youtube Howto Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9FGAU9S9Ow
- Inclusion of a CFF and a JSON file in the codebase for automated GitHub-Zenodo integration: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Persistent_identifiers(pid)#Howto_2

Please contact me if you have any questions on this.

Best regards,
Peter
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Peter_Loewe

> Gesendet: Dienstag, 11. Januar 2022 um 12:57 Uhr
> Von: "Peter Löwe" <peter.loewe at gmx.de>
> An: board at qgis.org, psc at qgis.org
> Betreff: DOI for QGIS project / Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics
>
> Dear QGIS community,
>
> I'm reaching out to you because of an opportunity for the QGIS project, which surfaced recently:
> The upcoming second edition of the Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics will cover the QGIS project. The Handbook project has been delayed due to the Pandemic, but will be completed in a few weeks. I am serving as the editor of the Handbook chapter about Open Source Geoinformatics.
>
> Recently, new workflows for scientific citation of software projects have emerged and are becoming state of the art. This includes references by persistent digital object identifiers (DOI) to software projects instead of URLs. DOI-based references allow to give due credit to the whole project team, including first authors, developers, but also maintainers and people in other roles.
>
> The OSGeo projects GRASS GIS, GMT, MapServer, MOSS and rasdaman have already registered their own DOI, OSGeoLive will follow soon.
> Hands on information how to register a DOI for a OSGeo project are available here: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Persistent_identifiers(pid):
>
> As an example, this is the DOI for GRASS GIS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5810537
>
> The Editors of the Springer Handbook agree that including DOI references for Open Source projects is a win-win-scenario for the upcoming book and also the OSGeo project communities. They have extended the production deadline until January 20 to give additional software projects the opportunity to register a DOI to be included in the book chapter.
>
> If the QGIS project registers a DOI (takes only a few minutes) before the deadline of January 20, I would gladly include it in the Open Source Geoinformatics chapter reference section.
>
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions.
>
> Best,
> Peter
> https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Peter_Loewe
>