Stakeholders in Software Citation: Lessons learned from the GRASS GIS community
Creators: name: Löwe, Peter
name: Neteler, Markus
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018
Subjects: Software Citation, RDA, Research Data Alliance, GRASS GIS, Open Source Geospatial Foundation, OSGeo, Software Metadata, FORCE11, GIS, Open Science, Mundialis, DIW Berlin, DIW, Geoinformatics, RDA Plenary 2018, RDA Berlin 2018, RDA Berlin

description: We report on ongoing efforts within the GRASS GIS community to establish a workflow for creating on-demand citations for individual GRASS GIS modules rather that just the entire software suite,  and the resulting lessons learned as feedback for the RDA community. A citation capability on the level of individual GRASS modules is a crucial step to enable citations of research code applying or extending GRASS GIS as part of Open Science.

GRASS GIS is the oldest existing and actively developed open source community project in the geospatial domain. Being initiated in 1982, it has been a founding member and strong driver of the OSGeo foundation of geospatial software projects, which was established in 2006.

In the meantime, the paradigm of Open Science is affecting both scientists in and beyond the geospatial domain, but also the volunteers themselves, which enable community-driven software projects. Open Science requires the citation of scientific articles, the underlying data and the research code used to compute the results. GRASS GIS is very actively used in science. Due to its open source nature, new and innovative functionalities can easily be implemented in GRASS GIS. Once such code meets the requirements to become part of the GRASS GIS code repository (either the core system or the GRASS GIS Addons repository), it will be maintained by the force of volunteers and updated to meet technology changes, as long as it is considered useful for the GRASS GIS user communities.

However, the options for citing GRASS GIS software in scientific writing are currently limited. The latest stable version, GRASS GIS 7.4, provides a built-in functionality for a BibTEX citation link for the whole GRASS GIS software suite. While the volunteer community provides a repository of best-practices and static examples for citations (https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Citation_Repository), there is still a lack of software functionality for scientific citation of selected GRASS GIS modules in multiples citation styles, as it is provided in research data repositories like Zenodo. To mitigate this situation, a new GRASS GIS Addon module is being implemented (g.cite) which supports different citation styles.

During this effort, an in-depth examination of the current workflow for the generation of meta-data for GRASS modules was undertaken. This has led to recommendations for the GRASS developer community regarding the need for extended machine-actionable meta-data based on the FAIR principles. Vice versa, new real-world requirements for data citation from long-lived software projects, spanning multiple decades, were collected.

There is a need to enable fine-granulated citation to give credit both to first authors, but also for later additions of extended functionality, performance improvement by refactoring, and the porting to changing software environments. As all these tasks are essential to ensure the long term availability of mature research tools like GRASS GIS to the scientific community, the individuals performing them deserve due credit. This must be reflected by the current discussion towards best-practices for research code citation.