Addressing Research Software Sustainability via Institutes

TL;DR

Research software sustainability is crucial for modern research, and institutes like SSI, URSSI, and AuSSI play a key role in developing best practices, fostering community, and reducing maintenance effort.

Contribution

This paper discusses the role of research software sustainability institutes and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses in supporting sustainable research software.

Findings

Institutes develop and disseminate best practices for software sustainability.

They help build communities around sustainable research software.

Institutes can reduce ongoing maintenance effort.

Abstract

Research software is essential to modern research, but it requires ongoing human effort to sustain: to continually adapt to changes in dependencies, to fix bugs, and to add new features. Software sustainability institutes, amongst others, develop, maintain, and disseminate best practices for research software sustainability, and build community around them. These practices can both reduce the amount of effort that is needed and create an environment where the effort is appreciated and rewarded. The UK SSI is such an institute, and the US URSSI and the Australian AuSSI are planning to become institutes, and this extended abstract discusses them and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.