Open geospatial research software in 2024: Assessing service quality with technology readiness levels

To initiate, maintain and accelerate behavioral change towards Open and FAIR practices, tangible benefits for scientific communities and especially early career scientists are a critical key success factor. The realization of such benefits, by due credit, funding, or other means requires underlying workflows, enabled by underlying infrastructures and standards, which are operational, reliable and trusted. Many education efforts are under way to educate and motivate researchers how to embrace and particpate in Open and FAIR efforts, including the open geospatial community software projects of the OSGeo foundation. Still, from the perspective of a developer of research software, the current general service quality of offerings for PID-/citation-based credit remains limited, fickle, partially unpredictable and frustrating. This presentation demonstrates these challenges by real world examples from OSGeo open geospatial projects, such as QGIS, GRASS GIS and proj and resulting PID-references in publications. Further, a service centered approach is introduced to enable both end users and Open/FAIR communities to assess the overall service quality through Technological Readiness Levels (TRL), to improve the user experience by building trust and to focus further development ressources.