Going FAIR by the book: Accelerating the adoption of PID-enabled good practices in software communities through reference publication.

This is a report from the chapter editor's perspective of a high visibility publication effort to foster the adoption of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) by encouraging the adoption of Persistent Identifiers (PID) and repository-based workflows in geospatial open source software communities as good practices. Lessons learned are detailed about how to communicate the benefits of PID adoption to software project communities focussing on professional software-development and meritocracy. Also encountered communication bottleneck patterns, the significance of cross-project  multiplicators, remaining challenges and emerging opportunities for publishers and repository infrastructures are reported. For the second Edition of the Springer Handbook of Geographic Information, a team of scientific domain experts from several software communities was tasked to rewrite a chapter about Open Source Geographic Information Systems (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-53125-6_30). For this, a sample of representative geospatial open source projects was selected, based on the range of projects integrated in the OSGeo live umbrella project (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5884859). The chapters authors worked in close contact with the respective Open Source software project communities. Since the editing and production process for the Handbook of Geographic Information was delayed due to the pandemic, this provided the opportunity to explore, improve and implement good practices for state of the art PID-based citation of software projects and versions, but also project communities, data and related scientific video ressources. This was a learning process for all stakeholders involved in the publication project. At the completion of the project, the majority of the involved software projects had minted Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for their codebases. While the adoption level of software versioning with automated PID-generation and metadata quality remains heterogeneous, the insights gained from this process can simplify and accelerate the adoption of PID-based best software community practices for other open geospatial projects according to the FAIR principles.