OpenDORS: Open Dataset of Openly Referenced Open Research Software

In many academic disciplines, software is created during the research process or specifically for the purpose of enabling and improving critical research. The crucial role of software for research is increasingly acknowledged. The application of software engineering to research software has been formalized as research software engineering, to create better software that enables better research. Despite this, large-scale studies of research software and its development are still lacking. OpenDORS, the Open Dataset of Openly Referenced Open Research Software enables such studies. OpenDORS contains 134,352 unique open research software projects with referencing publications 134,154 source code repositories 122,425 latest versions in source code repositories with metadata on, e.g., license information, programming languages descriptive metadata files Usage Decompress the dataset archive, e.g., tar -xJvf OpenDORS.v2025-11.tar.xz Refer to schema.json for the structure of the dataset. Reproducibility To reproduce the dataset, extract OpenDORS-construction-workflow.tar.xz and refer to the included README.md.