Posted by n.chuehong on 22 November 2013 - 4:00pm

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released their report, entitled Scientific Infrastructure, looking into the state of scientific infrastructure in the UK. The committee, chaired by Lord Krebs, were broadly positive about the state of scientific infrastructure in the UK but found a ‘damaging disconnect’ between capital investment and funding for operational costs, i.e. that building important large scale infrastructure has been budgeted for, but the costs to keep it running have not.

This is something that the evidence submitted to the committee from the Software Sustainability Institute highlighted, and the report acknowledges our view that software maintenance is an operational cost that is often neglected:

"... a lack of investment in software maintenance does not allow best use to be made of the UK's existing scientific infrastructure. This is an operational cost that has been diminished in successive refreshes of the scientific hardware, and yet much scientific software (e.g. meteorological and climate models, computational chemistry codes) is required to run on many generations of hardware. Software is the infrastructure, and hardware the consumable. Maintenance is required when there are hardware, operating system and software library changes." 

The report also drew attention to the need for skilled software developers and technicians and the development of attractive career paths:

"In many areas, particularly high-performance computing, big data etc, it seems there is a willingness to make capital investment, but a reluctance to balance this with investment in the people needed to run the equipment. The traditional model of having postdoctoral researchers develop and maintain equipment and software is unsustainable. Skilled software developers and technicians are crucial to modern scientific endeavour so developing appropriate and appealing career paths and incentives and allocating appropriate operational budgets, taking these into account at the investment decision stage, and then committing to deliver them, are essential."

We hope that this report leads to further progress in the development of a broad base of skilled researchers and software engineers working to create key pieces of sustainable research software. We have highlighted six points that research funders in the UK can implement to improve the return of investment in research software. Together with a strategy and an investment plan at the Government level, we can ensure the UK’s place at the forefront of scientific research.