For decades, the Open Science movement—driven by both funder mandates and scholarly norms—has sought to make academic research in all disciplines accessible to everyone, both in and outside the academy. Yet while the academic research enterprise has made significant strides in building infrastructure to support open access publication, the sharing of research data, and other core aspects of Open Science, there is an additional area that has received less attention within academia: open source research software (OSRS).

To begin to address this gap, Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation hosted “Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise” (SOSSRE), a one-day in-person workshop made possible with generous funding from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and a gift from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The workshop, which took place on August 8, 2025, aimed to define sustainability in the OSRS context, identify pathways to sustainability, and catalyze relationships between OSRS developers and other open source communities. We’re sharing our findings from the workshop in a new report published today.

The production of scientific findings typically has two important components: the data used for analysis, and the analytical process that the data undergoes—often aided by code or software—to reach the findings. And while some of this software is proprietary, expensive to license, and supported by the infrastructure of a software company, a large proportion of the analytical software created and used by academic researchers is open source software (OSS), which require a different development, support, and maintenance model than proprietary, vendor-supported options.

Sustainability of this open source research software is important for many of the same reasons as other tenets of Open Science: the software must be accessible to future researchers for purposes of reproducibility; reuse of code rather than recreation economizes time and money; knowledge of analytical processes is not locked behind exclusionary paywalls. Yet researchers often view software as a tool rather than a research output, even when researchers have created it as part of their research process. Like datasets, OSRS has the potential to be useful to other researchers. Unlike most datasets, the best OSRS applications have the potential to evolve over time as new users engage with and contribute to them. Sustainability for OSRS is partially about documenting and preserving code, but also involves cultivating communities that will maintain that code and guide its development over time.

Open source software developers in non-academic contexts—who are often interested in technology and code for its own sake—have developed a robust set of practices and infrastructures that sustain many OSS applications. Yet transferring these methods into the academic research enterprise has proven challenging, in part because academic silos create roadblocks. By convening open source developers and advocates from the nonprofit, private, and academic sectors, our workshop sought to generate innovative frameworks for sustaining OSRS at colleges and universities.

Workshop attendees pointed to several key challenges and opportunities facing OSRS:

  • Convincing university stakeholders to prioritize OSRS sustainability and creating more opportunities for academic researchers and open source communities to intersect are important first steps.
  • The reform of academic incentive structures and the incorporation of student labor are goals that faculty and academic affairs staff can pursue to work toward OSRS sustainability.
  • Centralization of open source activity on campus, alongside creating connections across institutions and with funders and organizations outside the academy, will create a web of support for OSRS.
  • More sector-wide playbooks for categorizing OSRS projects and systems for cataloging them are needed to increase the visibility of the issue.

This project follows several others that Ithaka S+R has tracked in this space, including on open access publishing, data sharing, data communities, and data support services. As we continue to explore the core components of the Open Science movement, we are eager to learn about the opportunities and challenges you are seeing. Please reach out if you would like to connect on these topics.