JISC

This project has now concluded. The final report and other documentation is available at the bottom of this page.

Software is often an important output of a research project. Sometimes a piece of software is the primary output of the research, sometimes it is a tool developed for a specific purpose, sometimes it is a proof of concept. Often research data can be of little use without the specific software developed to process it.

It is widely accepted that the preservation of software in working form is particularly difficult to ensure over the long term. Software depends critically on many aspects of its environment, such as the hardware and software platform, compilers, libraries, and other associated software components. Thus digital decay can affect software far more than other digital artefacts because changes in any one of these related technologies can render a piece of software inoperable. Furthermore, even when the software in question is actively maintained, its interfaces and functionality may evolve so that it becomes impossible to validate results by rerunning a particular analysis as it was in some previous version of the software.

This project will investigate issues around the deposition and preservation of software artefacts in repositories. It will develop guidelines for the preservation of software research outputs, in particular, considering the use of existing software repositories such as sourceForge. It will develop these guidelines from the partners’ experience in running a number of software repositories but in particular by monitoring and analysing in detail a particular case study which is a thematic software repository in the software engineering domain.