An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action

Abstract

Research software has become a central asset in academic research. It optimizes existing and enables new research methods, implements and embeds research knowledge, and constitutes an essential research product in itself. Research software must be sustainable in order to understand, replicate, reproduce, and build upon existing research or conduct new research effectively. In other words, software must be available, discoverable, usable, and adaptable to new needs, both now and in the future. Research software therefore requires an environment that supports sustainability. Hence, a change is needed in the way research software development and maintenance are currently motivated, incentivized, funded, structurally and infrastructurally supported, and legally treated. Failing to do so will threaten the quality and validity of research. In this paper, we identify challenges for research software sustainability in Germany and beyond, in terms of motivation, selection, research software engineering personnel, funding, infrastructure, and legal aspects. Besides researchers, we specifically address political and academic decision-makers to increase awareness of the importance and needs of sustainable research software practices. In particular, we recommend strategies and measures to create an environment for sustainable research software, with the ultimate goal to ensure that software-driven research is valid, reproducible and sustainable, and that software is recognized as a first class citizen in research. This paper is the outcome of two workshops run in Germany in 2019, at deRSE19 - the first International Conference of Research Software Engineers in Germany - and a dedicated DFG-supported follow-up workshop in Berlin.

Practices of Linked Open Data in Archaeology and Their Realisation in Wikidata

“…Only with an active user group, such frameworks as Wikidata, Pelagios, and other LOD providing systems can become sustainable. This also applies to research software [153]. Regarding the infrastructure side, a commitment by national and international funding bodies is necessary.…”

A sustainable infrastructure concept for improved accessibility, reusability, and archival of research software

“…Arguments for FLOSS in a research context and common misconceptions have been discussed, for instance, in [37]. Adopting a FLOSS license [14,37] (in contrast to a proprietary software license) implies that the software is modifiable (derivable) and redistributable which can be argued to be an essential prerequisite for a sustainable research software landscape [7,13,24,28,38,39]. Moreover, it can be argued that out of ethical responsibility, research software that is developed with the help of public funding should be publicly available [28].…”

“…Adopting a FLOSS license [14,37] (in contrast to a proprietary software license) implies that the software is modifiable (derivable) and redistributable which can be argued to be an essential prerequisite for a sustainable research software landscape [7,13,24,28,38,39]. Moreover, it can be argued that out of ethical responsibility, research software that is developed with the help of public funding should be publicly available [28]. Besides the software used specifically for research activities, employing FLOSS products is equally important for all infrastructure components [13].…”

“…In this work, we want to establish the basis for a sustainable research software lifecycle as shown in Fig. 1, combining best research software development practices [24,25] with sustainable and FAIR archival infrastructure [26][27][28]. We allow for a distributed view on data storage, where various research software artifacts may be stored in different (possibly specialized) data repositories, however, always cross-linked and FAIR.…”

Research Software Publication Policy Case Study

“…However, research publications that present novel results remain the key indicator of credit and acknowledgment of scholarly contributions. Previous work has described why this model of research publication is incompatible with a current ecosystem where significant effort is devoted to developing software tools in order to produce novel research results [2,10]. Previous scientometric work has also shown that software is often cited in traditional research publications [9,11], but tracing and identifying these software mentions is difficult due to disparate practices in publishing and archiving research software [7,14].…”