[Geoserver-devel] DOI for the Geoserver project / Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics

GeoServer GeoServer Developer
,
1

Hello Geoserver developers,

I'm reaching out to you because of an opportunity for the GeoServer community, which surfaced recently:
The upcoming second edition of the Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-72680-7) will cover the Geoserver 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.

As an example, this is the DOI for GRASS GIS: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5810537
Hands on information how to register a DOI for a OSGeo project are available here: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Persistent_identifiers(pid).

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 GeoServer project registers or reserves 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
<peter.loewe@anonymised.com>

2

On Thursday, 13 January 2022 2:26:01 AM AEDT Peter Löwe wrote:

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 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.

I'm not sure I understand what the advantage for geoserver is. I get that
Springer will sell more books. I don't see how having a DOI provides credit to
developers, maintainers or other people. How does it do that, and how does it
differ from a URL link in that respect.

Can you clarify?

Brad

3

Hello Brad, all,

unlike a URL, a DOI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier) will never break (no 404 error ever).

The authors and editors for the Handbook project work without financial compensation by Springer and will not benefit from the number of volumes sold.
The Open Source chapter aims to expose audiences, which still might believe that only facts are relevant when stated in cost intense non open access publications, to open source, open access, and open science.

The Handbook will be around for at least five, maybe ten years. One reason for DOI (which will keep pointing to the latest Geoserver 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.

The Geoserver community can of course register a DOI whenever they agree to do so. 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.

Some reasons for DOI for the Geoserver community are IMHO:

1) Little effort, no cost and significant benefits for everybody who's involved in GeoServer 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
3) Reference by DOI is the way to go when citing anything with a long list of authors/committers: Geoserver has about _547_ 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. This includes DOI for 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: https://doi.org/10.5446/40822 :slight_smile:

Does this help ?

Cheers,
Peter
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2257-0517

<peter.loewe@anonymised.com>

Gesendet: Donnerstag, 13. Januar 2022 um 04:01 Uhr
Von: "Brad Hards" <bradh@anonymised.com>
An: geoserver-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, "Peter Löwe" <peter.loewe@anonymised.com>
Betreff: Re: [Geoserver-devel] DOI for the Geoserver project / Springer Handbook of Geoinformatics

On Thursday, 13 January 2022 2:26:01 AM AEDT Peter Löwe wrote:
> 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 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.
I'm not sure I understand what the advantage for geoserver is. I get that
Springer will sell more books. I don't see how having a DOI provides credit to
developers, maintainers or other people. How does it do that, and how does it
differ from a URL link in that respect.

Can you clarify?

Brad

4

I think this is useful (maybe because I’m an ex-academic) so I’ll go ahead and register both GeoServer and GeoTools tomorrow.

Ian

···

Ian Turton

5

Ian, all,

thanks for your positive feedback.
Currently many folks across OSGeo projects are inestigating DOI for their projects.
If you run into problems & solve them, or there are other lessons learned, please share them on the wiki page for DOI and other related topics:
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Persistent_identifiers(pid)
(the wiki page is updated as often as possible)

Best,
Peter

peter.loewe@anonymised.com

···

Ian Turton

6

Looks like proj setup a config file to automatically generate a DOI for each release:
https://github.com/OSGeo/PROJ/pull/3019

Not sure what else needs to be done in order to generate a DOI per release, I guess there is
some other setup involved…

Cheers
Adrea

···

Regards,

Andrea Aime

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7

I have created https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5854561 for GeoServer and have added the .zenodo.json file to the repository - I’m not entirely sure that GitHub gave me all the contributors (and or my script may have dropped some) so please check if you are in it - also I have added affiliations where I know them but feel free to edit your entry.

Ian

···

Ian Turton

8

Ian, all,

thanks for registering a DOI for GeoServer. Looks good from my side !
GeoServer and the project committers will get due credit by DOI-based reference in the Springer Handbook project.
Those of you who have registered a ORCID want to check your ORCID account following the next software release in the GitHub repo: There will be a new entry in the “works” section giving credit for the release.

Best,
Peter

peter.loewe@anonymised.com

···

Ian Turton

9

Ian,

It appears the DOI has expired? Do we want to have another go …

Looking at https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DOI#Howto_information_for_GitHub_Repo_maintainers_.28source_Zenodo_FAQ.29

···

we may just be able to ask it to sync.

Jody Garnett

Ian Turton

10

Ian,

Going through the setup steps, it shows geoserver/geoserver as “This repository managed by another user of your GitHub organization”. So I cannot perform any troubleshooting steps.

Looking at history: https://zenodo.org/account/settings/github/repository/geoserver/geoserver

It shows that the process started failing for the 2.23.3 ten months ago … errors:

{
“error_id”: “997ac8d063a94329828c6175fbeee5ce”,
“errors”: “Extra metadata load failed.”
}

Checking history of nothing has changed with our .zendo.json file to cause this failure.

I have opened https://osgeo-org.atlassian.net/browse/GEOS-11520 to look at replacing .zendo.json with CITATION.cff (which is supported by GitHub and zenodo).

···

Jody Garnett

we may just be able to ask it to sync.

Jody Garnett

Ian Turton

11

Jody, Ian, all,

the GeoServer DOI appears ok for the 30 releases up to 2.23.1:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7986420

This is unusual:
Different persons are credited for the various GeoServer versions (Ian, Daniele, Jody, Gabriel, etc.) from version 2.23-RC1 (https://zenodo.org/records/7986414) on:

https://zenodo.org/search?q=parent.id%3A5854561&f=allversions%3Atrue&l=list&p=1&s=10&sort=version

Were the uploads to Zenodo done manually since then ?

BTW: All developers which already have registered an ORCID (unique personal ID) can include this into the metadata for due credit on their ORCID pages. E.g.: PROJ https://zenodo.org/records/12155730 (-> check the green icons behind the names of the developers).

Best,
Peter

peter.loewe@anonymised.com

12

I think it is picking up the individual name from the GitHub tag information:

No updates have been done manually, some kind of job is failing and producing errors.

We may need to contact zenodo support …

···

Jody Garnett

13

+1 for reporting this to the Zenodo support. They should be able to fix the author credits for the previous releases.

peter.loewe@anonymised.com

···

Jody Garnett

14

Jody,

can you point me to the failing job and the errors? I can’t see anything wrong - except that it is using the tag info instead of the .zendo.json file

I’ll have a look at adding a CITATION.cff to replace the json file (that I suspect no one has looked at since I wrote it).

Ian

···

Jody Garnett

Ian Turton

15

Sure - the failing jobs are here:

  1. Go to the GitHub interaction history https://zenodo.org/account/settings/github/repository/geoserver/geoserver (login required - I used GitHub credentials)

  2. Scroll down the list until you see the first failures

  3. The 2.23.1 release is an example, it shows a request that we add a CITATION.cff file

    Citation File:
    CITATION.cff files are plain text files with human- and machine-readable citation information for software. Code developers can include them in their repositories to let others know how to correctly cite their software.

    Payload:
    (big json blob here)

    Errors:
    {
    “error_id”: “997ac8d063a94329828c6175fbeee5ce”,
    “errors”: “Extra metadata load failed.”
    }

I expect they changed from .zendo.json to CITATION.cff at this point in time…

···

Jody Garnett

Jody Garnett

Ian Turton