Research software maintenance funding is a one-off pilot, not a recurring budget line

The Software Sustainability Institute's Research Software Maintenance Fund, £4.8m from UKRI's Digital Research Infrastructure programme with a first round in 2025, is the UK's first dedicated maintenance fund and proves demand: thirteen projects funded, four at up to £500k over two years and nine at up to £150k over one, with round two capped at £150k for twelve months. It is a fixed-term pilot set against a research software estate of thousands of packages underpinning UK science. When the DRI spending period ends there is no recurring UKRI line for keeping software alive, EPSRC fellowships for research software engineers have been sporadic, and grant incentives still reward novelty over stewardship, pushing the RSE workforce onto short contracts.

The UK invented the research software engineer profession, and the software multiplying every UKRI research pound decays on volunteer time. Maintenance funding at roughly one per cent of what is spent producing software would protect the reproducibility and reuse of the rest.

A permanent maintenance stream within UKRI's Digital Research Infrastructure programme, on the model of the US NSF's POSE programme or Germany's DFG research-software line, plus block funding for institutional RSE teams, converting the pilot into standing infrastructure.

// State-led: Instrument: permanent UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure budget line converting the RSMF pilot.

A working pilot has proven demand, so making the stream recurring is a budget decision to progress against a future spending period rather than an acute emergency.