Strategic priorities and challenges in research software funding: Results from an international survey (Dataset)

Research software is increasingly recognized as critical infrastructure in contemporary science. Research software spans a broad spectrum, including source code files, algorithms, scripts, computational workflows, and executables, all created for or during research. Research funders have developed programs, initiatives and policies to bolster research software’s role. However, there has been no empirical study of how research funders prioritize support for research software. This information is needed to clarify where current funder support is concentrated and where strategic gaps may exist. Here, we present data from a survey of research software funders (n=36) from around the world. The survey explored these funders’ priorities, finding a strong emphasis on developing skills, software sustainability, embedding open science, building community and collaboration, advancing research software funding, increasing software visibility and use, innovation and security. Methods This research was carried out using a survey combining qualitative and quantitative items. The survey was designed to investigate how research software funders support research software’s sustainability and impact. The study was reviewed and given an exempt determination by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institutional Review Board (no. 24374). Survey design The survey designed for this study began by collecting profile information, including institutional affiliation and job title. The survey gathered information about respondents’ organization’s initiatives, policies, or programs to support research software. The range of questions yielded too much data for one article. In this article, we focus exclusively on the results generated via an open-ended question asking about the top priorities for the respondents’ organizations’ support for research software: “What are your organization's top priorities related to research software?”. Four open-response text boxes were provided for respondents to indicate and list these priorities. Sampling This survey was aimed at international research funders, including governmental and non-governmental (e.g., philanthropic) funders. A list of contacts to invite to participate in this survey was created based on participation in the Research Software Association (ReSA) and responsibility for research software funding known to the authors. This initial list of people was refined, with removals based on individuals having moved to unrelated professional roles or being unavailable long-term, for example, due to personal issues. The final, refined contact list comprised 71 people. After removing individuals when a member of their organization already provided a complete answer or when the person turned out to no longer be working on a relevant topic or to be otherwise unavailable (total of n=30), 41 people remained. Five of these individuals did not complete the survey, while 36 people (representing 30 research funding organizations) did, yielding a response rate of 87.8%. Fully completed survey responses were not required for individuals to be retained in the sample, resulting in varied sample bases across survey questions. The sample includes research funders in North and South America, Europe, Oceania and Asia, but over-represents North America and European funder representatives. Some participating funders cover a broad spectrum of disciplines, while others focus on a particular domain such as social science, health, environment, physical sciences or humanities. Continent Count North America 15 South America 4 Europe 12 Oceania 3 Asia 1 The respondents represented research funders supported by governmental (n=26), philanthropic (n=6) and corporate (n=1) resources. Respondents’ job titles span the following categories: Senior Leadership and Executive, such as a Vice President of Strategy; Program and Project Management, such as Senior Program Manager; Planning and Business Development; Scientific, Technical and IT, such as Scientific Information Lead. Most respondents 72.7% (n=24) answered ‘Yes’ to the question, “Has your organization established any policies, initiatives or programs aimed at supporting research software?”, while 18.2% (n=6) said ‘No’ and 9.1% (n=3) ‘Unsure’. Data collection, management and analysis Data collection took place from December 2023 to May 2024. The mean completion time for the detailed survey was 28 minutes and 13 seconds. The data were cleaned and prepared for analysis by removing any identifiable respondent details. The data analysis process followed a standard thematic qualitative analysis approach (e.g., Jensen & Laurie, 2016). This involved first identifying themes and organizing the data accordingly. Dimensions of each theme were identified where relevant. Then data extracts were selected from the survey responses associated with each theme and theme dimension.