Facilitating self-sustainability of research software

The Software Sustainability Institute was founded to support the UK’s research software community - a community that includes the majority of UK’s researchers.

Its mission is to cultivate better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research (better software, better research. Software is fundamental to research: seven out of ten UK researchers report that their work would be impossible without it.

Organised around five teams (community, policy, software, training, and communications) the Institute has built a large network of Fellows from across research disciplines; championed software and software career paths through House of Lords, BIS and RCUK reports; worked with many projects to directly improve their codes, written an extensive number of popular guides; and organised training events to teach over 1,000 learners the basics of software engineering – thus helping thousands of people to build better research software.

The four institutions in the consortium – Edinburgh, Southampton, Manchester, Oxford – represent over 25 years of collaboration on software for research with unparalleled software engineering expertise.