By Christopher Brown, Senior co-design manager, Jisc, Neil Chue Hong, Director, The Software Sustainability Institute, and Mike Jackson, Software Architect, The Software Sustainability Institute

On the 7th March, Jisc and the Software Sustainability Institute ran a Software Deposit and Preservation Policy and Planning Workshop at Jisc’s Brettenham House in London. This is part of an activity, funded by Jisc, to provide software deposit and preservation guidance, in particular to develop use cases and workflows for software deposit via Jisc's Research Data Shared Service (RDSS).

Our 17 attendees were members of Jisc's RDSS pilot institutions, research data managers and research software engineers—all sharing an interest in the archiving and preservation of research software.

Chris gave an introduction to the RDSS and Neil introduced the Institute's activity on software deposit. Mike presented workflows for software deposit, derived from current implementations including the Figshare-GitHub integration, the Zenodo-GitHub integration, EasyDeposit and pyrdm, and provided an overview of the sources of software metadata and challenges and limitations in its capture. Each presentation served as the motivation for breakout sessions, in which attendees reviewed the workflows, identified additional workflows, discussed metadata collection and linkage with other research outputs, and suggested metadata required for preservation, discovery and credit. The workshop concluded with breakout sessions to identify good practices, the impact these could have, and who would be best to drive adoption of these.

We will be collating the workshop outputs to produce a report which will be published in due course. This report, together with guidelines on metadata and software deposit content, will be presented at a second event in the summer.