Institutional Policy Pathways for Supporting Research Software: Global Trends and Local Practices

2025-09-30

AI Summary

This study identifies a systemic policy gap in research software governance at academic institutions: researchers developing and maintaining scientific software lack formal recognition, while training, incentive structures, and sustainable support mechanisms remain critically underdeveloped. Through a global survey, multi-country case studies, and comparative policy analysis, the research systematically documents these deficiencies—particularly the institutional neglect of software contributions within research evaluation frameworks. Integrating FAIR principles and open science tenets, it proposes an actionable, cross-institutional policy framework for end-to-end research software governance across its lifecycle. The findings directly informed the joint ReSA–RDA Working Group’s development of international governance guidelines. By providing empirically grounded recommendations and implementation pathways, this work supports institutions in enhancing research quality, ensuring software sustainability, and strengthening scholarly competitiveness. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation
• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Technology governance, policy, and regulations
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

As research software becomes increasingly central to modern science, research-performing organisations (RPOs) need to ensure that their investment in people, skills and infrastructure around research software produces sustainable and maintainable software that improves the research they perform, which in turn improves the overall institution and its reputation and funding, for example, by competing with peers who lack this approach. However, research institution management and recognition of research software and its personnel has mostly often developed in an ad hoc manner. RPO training infrastructures, recognition and reward structures, have not developed at a sufficient rate to support and encourage both the widespread use of research software best practices and the long-term support for technical roles that is required. To begin to address this fundamental problem for modern research environments, RPOs must implement and adopt robust policies to support research software development, use, and sustainability. Despite growing momentum from funders and publishers around FAIR and open science principles, research institutional-level policies specifically addressing research software remain limited or lacking in breadth. This article outlines the work of the Policies in Research Organisations for Research Software (PRO4RS) Working Group (WG), a joint initiative of the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), which examined and advanced research software policy development across institutions worldwide. After consideration of the rationale for institutional policies on research software, the PRO4RS WG outputs and analysis are utilised to highlight critical policy gaps, particularly related to consideration of research software personnel in policy work focused on reform of research assessment.

Problem

• Addressing inadequate institutional support for research software sustainability
• Identifying policy gaps in research software personnel recognition and rewards
• Developing global institutional policies to support research software development

Innovation

• Implementing robust institutional policies for software support
• Addressing policy gaps in research software personnel recognition
• Advancing global research software policy development initiatives