US Research Software Sustainability Institute

URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use , of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.

Learn more about our mission and vision

URSSI Updates

Keep up to date with URSSI's new activities

Announcing 4 new grants for URSSI

For many of us who develop, maintain, and use research software, the issue of software sustainability or lack thereof has been an issue near and dear to our hearts. After numerous efforts to address different aspects of this issue over the past decade, we secured funding from the National Science Foundation in 2017 to build US community around this area and architect what an ideal institute might look like. After several workshops involving the wider research community and several pilot activities, we formulated a plan for an institute. → More

Best Practices for Software Registries and Repositories

(This post is cross-posted on the SciCodes website, the SSI blog, the ASCL blog, and the FORCE11 blog.) Software is a fundamental element of the scientific process, and cataloguing scientific software is helpful to enable software discoverability. During the years 2019-2020, the Task Force on Best Practices for Software Registries of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group worked to create Nine Best Practices for Scientific Software Registries and Repositories. → More

Upcoming community calls and events

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on workshops, training events, conferences and more.

Core URSSI Projects

As we get started on the institue, we have launched a series of core projects to improve the sustaniability of research software and the people who produce it.

New School in Research Software Engineering

As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, this grant funds an effort by Kyle Niemeyer, Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, to develop and run four, weeklong “beyond introductory” winter/summer schools for researchers who want to deepen their software engineering skills.


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Characterizing Research Software from NSF Awards

This EAGER project will investigate the development and maintenance of software produced in research projects funded by the National Science Foundation. The goals of this project are: To understand what factors influence software sustainability by gathering data from grant-funded research projects; To describe current models of sustainability planning and suggest potential new models that could increase the likelihood of achieving long-term software sustainability; and To develop new methods to evaluate research software sustainability.


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Policy Research around software sustainability

The URSSI policy project asks “How can policy be used to increase the sustainability and impact of research software in the scholarly research community?” It has three objectives: 1) Influencing positive policy changes, 2) Understanding why such changes succeed and fail in this context, and 3) Planning for future policy work based on these lessons.

The project will rely on a postdoc, and is currently seeking the right person; see the job posting


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