Better Software Funding, Better Research Software? What we've learned from the Research Software Maintenance Fund and what you should know about getting funding for software development

It can often seem difficult, even for widely used research software, to find resources for its maintenance, refactoring and community development, because the focus of much research funding is on novelty and generation of results. The Institute for Research Software (previously the Software Sustainability Institute) is running the Research Software Maintenance Fund (RSMF), supported by the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme, offering £4.8 million to support and sustain key research software, ensuring it remains reliable and accessible. This initiative is not only funding vital pieces of the research ecosystem but helps us understand what support research software needs to reduce technical debt and grow engagement, and how we can effectively provide it. It is one of a small number of such funds looking to support research software more directly. In this short talk, we’ll be giving an overview of the funding landscape, and how it relates to the stage of the lifecycle of your software. We’ll present analysis from two rounds of the RSMF around the types of activities, teams, and areas that are seeking support, along with some of the trends in development practices and use of AI. We’ll discuss some of the challenges of running a fund like this, and how we’ve tried to mitigate them. Finally, we’ll present some reflections on what we’ve seen, that may be useful if you are applying for research software funding in the future and ask you for suggestions about what should happen next.