Research Software Preservation: Libraries' role and contribution to a key pillar of Open Science

Abstract The awareness and recognition of software’s role in all scientific communities is growing as a result of the Open Science movement and as a response to the reproducibility challenges. Alongside publications and data, software is a pillar of the academic ecosystem. The preservation of the source code over the long term is one of the cornerstones of a reliable knowledge base with the potential to increase the transparency, reproducibility, and accountability of scientific research. Libraries play an important role when it comes to documenting, describing and linking academic resources. We claim that libraries have at their disposal a trustworthy gateway with the universal source code library, Software Heritage (SWH), to link research outputs to software source code. In this presentation, we explain the SWH infrastructure. We also illustrate partnerships with different institutions, including academic libraries, scholarly repositories, publishers and the National Library of France to share knowledge, expertise and collaborate towards the archival of the academic software corpus. SWH is an open, non-profit, and multi-stakeholder initiative that builds the universal archive of all publicly available source code, launched by Inria in partnership with UNESCO in 2015. SWH collects, preserves, and makes accessible the source code and development history of publicly available softwares over the long term, therefore also fulfilling the core missions of libraries. The curation and preservation of software requires different functionalities and services than the processing of publications or research data. Moreover, SWH’s approach differs from the legal deposit of software and databases, managed by the national French library (BnF). In the presentation, we will demonstrate methods to build the full collection of code and metadata describing the software in a library of living source code. We’ll also explain how SWH provides practical solutions for researchers helping them publish articles that are “link rot proof”. Furthermore, librarians and academic support staff require training to understand how to better archive and curate research software in their own collections or how to better reference to outputs that are archived in Software Heritage. In 2023, the Alexandria source code library provides access to more than 13 billion unique files from forges and platforms around the world. The inclusion of SWH in the academic ecosystem also involves institutional incentives and the use of SWH is now part of the recommendations of the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF). The support provided by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the creation of a network of ambassadors also contribute to promoting SWH to its audiences. The recognition of the importance of software in research remains a longterm task, which calls for technical as well as political and methodological solutions. The support of researchers as well as the development of descriptive standards for software will play a major role in giving software the place it deserves. From many points of view, to quote C. Borgman, software heritage is definitively the next frontier for libraries