Open Geospatial Software Citation: Status, Patterns and Trends – A Crossref-based data analysis

The paradigm of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) implies that due credit for scientific results can and will be provided when such results are properly referenced and cited in scientific literature. This applies also to open research code as part of scientific output.

This presentation provides a summary of a four year analysis for a cohort of open source software projects, and their DOI-based citation in scientific publications, based on metadata from Crossref (crossref.org). The results indicate that the mere availability of the required underlying technical infrastructure is a requirement for but does not suffice to ensure acceptance in science and common practice. In addition, organisational changes of best practices are needed, for software project communities, but also journals and publishers. Once all these factors are established, the results show positive trends of acceptance und usage across scientific communities, to reference fundamental open scientific software by Digital Object Identifers (DOI). For this study, a cohort of open source software projects was approached to mint DOI as an emerging good practice for a high visibility publication which was published in 2021 (Springer Handbook of Geographic Information, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53125-6_30). The cohort comprised a representative range of open geospatial software projects of that time, including core libraries such a GDAL and PROJ, desktop GIS such as GRASS GIS, QGIS and gvSIG, but also infrastructure and web based applications like PostGIS, rasdaman and actinia, among others. The majority of the software project cohort is federated in the OSGeo Foundation (OSGeo.org). OSGeo membership requires for software projects to implement quality standards for project, code and community management, including the use of a software repository. For this,most of the projects use GitHub (github.com/osgeo), which allowed for automated software release deposit in the Zenodo Open Access repository (Zenodo.org), resulting in the minting of an initial concept DOI and further version DOI for following version releases by the software projects. In the following, the open digital infrastructure Crossref  for persistent cross-platform citations linking in online academic journals was anually queried for citations related to the cohort, and additional OSGeo projects which elected to mint DOI independently. The current results show a modest use of DOI based citations for the majority of the cohort but a significant and growing citation footprint for core geospatial libraries such as PROJ (proj.org) and GDAL (gdal.org), which are used across all scientific fields. The DOI-based citations of GDAL registered by CrossRef show a continuing growth rate of over 100% anually since 2022. An additional outcome of the analysis is that for some Open Access publications, full metadata forwarding to Crossref, which is a requirement for DOI-based FAIR software citation, still remains to be implemented.