Software Deposit and Preservation Policy and Planning Workshop Report

On 7th March 2018, Jisc and The Software Sustainability Institute organised a Software Deposit and Preservation Policy and Planning Workshop at Jisc’s London offices. This workshop brought together members of pilot institutions from Jisc’s Research Data Shared Service (RDSS) and other institutions interested in research software preservation.

The workshop presented work done by the Software Sustainability Institute to examine the current workflows used to preserve software as a research object as part of research data management procedures. The attendees discussed these workflows, the nature of software deposits, how to collect software-related metadata and what metadata should be collected to satisfy the
requirements of researchers, research data managers (RDMs), institutions and funders. The workshop concluded with a discussion of the best practices required for software preservation and ways to ensure that these can be adopted in research communities.

This report summarises the key findings and outcomes from the workshop.