Tales of Transitions: Seeking Scientific Software Sustainability

Software is crucial to science, but sustaining projects for long term impact is challenging. Scientists and funders look to ''the open source way'' (known as peer production in the organizational literature) as a promising route to sustainability. We studied scientific software projects funded by research grants and which were encouraged by their funder to develop a sustainable community around their open source code. Using interviews and content analysis of online presences, we studied the projects over a seven year period, from receiving grants around 2014 through the typically three years of funding, and for up to four years following the funding. We make four contributions: First, we find that by far the most successful route to peer production was beginning as peer production, a result with clear policy implications. Second, through our taxonomies of organizational forms and of organizational change, we paint a landscape of the variety of forms that scientific software development can take on and transition between providing language for discussion in the literature and among communities of practice. Third, we use these taxonomies to describe multiple routes to sustainable software development. Finally, we discuss the challenges and strategies involved in sustaining scientific software, including choices not to pursue peer production at all.