On August 8, 2025, we convened 40 people representing a wide range of perspectives to discuss strategies for sustaining open source software (OSS) that is used for research.

Sustainability is a major challenge for even the most successful open source software, which requires ongoing community engagement to improve and maintain code. Sustainability also includes identifying a viable financial model, establishing project governance, building the technology infrastructure, and navigating legal and licensing issues. OSS for research often faces further challenges, including its reliance on grant funding and ambiguity about its value in the academic incentive structure. OSS for research has yet to secure a firm institutional footprint, and many of these projects are abandoned within their first few years, impacting both reproducibility and the integrity of the scholarly record. To address these issues, Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation hosted a one-day workshop in New York City with funding from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

One of the primary goals of the workshop was to bring together open source communities that do not often have the chance to interact with each other. Leaders who champion OSS in the nonprofit and private sectors, as well as those in higher education who use OSS for purposes of administration or teaching and learning, have developed a number of feasible sustainability models; however, transplanting those models to the academic research context has proved difficult. The Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise (SOSSRE) workshop (with its open call for participants) brought together leaders and science researchers from these sometimes siloed communities to see the commonalities across their experiences. As participant Rosalyn Metz, a CTO / consultant at Emory Libraries and Museum, put it: “One of the most refreshing reminders from the workshop is that open source isn’t a single, unified thing; it’s a patchwork of sub-communities, each with its own norms, histories, and pressures… Stepping into adjacent spaces made me realize just how much we share across communities, even when the surface-level problems look completely different.”

Mark McBride stands at right, speaking into a microphone and gesturing. He is standing in front of a slideshow displaying the SOSSRE name and logo. At left the 40 workshop participants are seated classroom style, facing Mark, in Ithaka S+R’s offices, a large carpeted room where the windowed back walls look out on the Manhattan skyline.

Mark McBride welcomes SOSSRE participants to the workshop at the beginning of the day.

The workshop proper began with a plenary moderated by Patrick Masson, executive director of the Apereo Foundation. Masson asked the plenary speakers—Cat Allman (VP, Open Source, Digital Science); Karmen Condic-Jurkic (executive director, Open Molecular Software Foundation); Clare Dillon (community lead, CURIOSS); and Allison Randal (senior researcher, Capabilities Limited)—to define sustainability, then solicited their thoughts on OSS metrics, maturity models, what projects need to thrive, how to avoid over-expansion, and the value proposition of OSS for higher ed. As Masson wrote, “Our panelists’ deep expertise—spanning nonprofit, academic, research, and industry contexts—set a thoughtful and energizing tone for the day.” In one memorable exchange, Allman noted that software built by an individual for their personal research needs could be like a cotton swab: you don’t reuse cotton swabs. But if you are going to reuse OSS, you should think about making it usable by others. The plenary speakers laid out a landscape survey of the types of challenges that are common in OSS communities.

Following the plenary, participants split into breakout groups for the first discussion, centered around identifying challenges to sustainability distinct to OSS for research. Facilitators at each breakout table (Ithaka S+R and Apereo staff members) asked participants to share their personal experiences with the challenges discussed in the plenary. Participants also determined which challenges are unique to the research context. During lunchtime, the facilitators synthesized participants’ ideas from this session into five major sustainability challenges of OSS for research:

  1. How can we overcome researchers’ cultural barriers to open culture?
  2. Who should be responsible for sustaining OSS for research?
  3. How can we know who is or could be using an OSS product?
  4. What is the value proposition for universities? Why should they prioritize OSS?
  5. What extra-institutional support is needed to sustain OSS for research?

After lunch, participants again broke into groups to brainstorm solutions to each of those five challenges. They rotated through each table so everyone had a chance to brainstorm solutions to each challenge.

At the end of the workshop, facilitators summarized the solutions they had heard for each challenge. Below we share some examples of important themes that surfaced in the discussions.

Communication was noted by the plenary speakers as a “non-negotiable” aspect of sustainability for OSS. This theme also emerged in various forms in the breakout groups, in references to communication within and between communities who engage in OSS for research, and between these communities and other groups, such as higher ed administrators, external support structures, and the public. For example, one group noted that communicating with institution-level marketing and other administrators about their successes with OSS for research and giving them “something to talk about from a PR perspective” would encourage them to be “more interested in sustaining and funding the work.”

Discoverability is especially essential to the sustainability of OSS for research. Several solutions to the challenges OSS for research faces involve building systems whereby software use and dependencies would be catalogued, visible, and identifiable to anyone. For example, one participant proposed a “GitHub for ideas” that would allow researchers to publish their intent to build an OSS project in advance.

Incorporating academic incentive structures was proposed as a solution to several sustainability challenges. This could involve “[treating] software like published research and datasets,” as Rosalyn Metz noted in her summary of the workshop, or reforming existing methods for evaluating researchers. One idea that was proposed involved creating an impact factor system for research OSS in order to inspire interest from the office of the vice president for research.

Decision-making assistance to link particular OSS with particular needs was another concern that came up repeatedly. Participants noted that Open Source Program Offices could develop criteria for which software should be sustained and assist researchers in determining whether their software met these criteria. Another participant voiced a need to validate which software is safe and stable for reuse, suggesting that an independent body could create a fee-for-service process for vetting existing OSS.

This is just a small sample of solutions that were proposed by workshop participants. Ithaka S+R will expand on these themes when we synthesize the findings from the workshop in a report that will be published later this year.

We are grateful to our funders, our partners and staff, and all the workshop participants for making this event happen.

A group of 40 people wearing nametags smiles and poses in Ithaka S+R’s offices in front of a honey wood wall with gray carpet.

Participants at the 2025 Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise workshop.