The Research Software Infrastructure (RSI) Forum is a collaboration of infrastructure organisations committed to supporting research software, and those who develop it, as fundamental and vital to research. Infrastructure organisations are organisations that support research software development, maintenance, sharing, connectivity, etc., often through services.
Software is an essential constituent of research, and research software is recognised as a crucial part of open science in key international policy documents from UNESCO and the OECD. However, some aspects of infrastructure have failed to keep pace with the scale of use of research software in research. Infrastructure that supports research software can play a key role in improving research impact. Increased focus on alignment can provide societal benefits that include accelerating innovation, reducing information-sharing gaps, encouraging innovation, and promoting reproducibility.
The RSI Forum provides a formal mechanism for members to share practices and consider how to individually and collectively address common challenges to achieve the significant cultural change needed across the research sector globally. It aims to:
- Enable collaborations between infrastructure providers that may address topics such as how to address key technical research software community challenges; achieve long-term sustainability for research software; or address social challenges such as diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
- Increase sharing of practices for research software infrastructures, to encourage reflection and advancement.
For further information, please refer to the Terms of Reference
Membership is open to any infrastructure organisation that serves research software and that seeks to help identify and resolve gaps and points of friction in using infrastructures in various research software use cases. This includes:
- Software registries and repositories (e.g., Zenodo, GitHub)
- Software journals (e.g., Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), Journal of Research Software (JORS))
- Software sustainability organisations (e.g., Software Sustainability Institute)
- Software preservation organisations (e.g., Software Heritage)
- Organisations and initiatives that create standards (e.g., CITATION.cff, FAIR-Impact, CodeMeta).
Members can invite other organisations that provide infrastructure to research software to join at their own discretion, or potential participants can contact ReSA for information on joining.
