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

The SSI's Research Software Maintenance Fund (£4.8m from UKRI's Digital Research Infrastructure programme, first round 2025) is the UK's first dedicated maintenance fund and proves demand: 13 projects funded (four up to £500k/two years, nine up to £150k/one year), with round 2 capped at £150k for 12 months. But it is a fixed-term pilot 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, and EPSRC RSE fellowships have been sporadic. Grant incentives still reward novelty over stewardship, pushing the RSE workforce (organised by the Society of Research Software Engineering) onto short contracts.

The UK invented the RSE profession, yet the software multiplying every UKRI research pound decays on volunteer time. Maintenance funding at roughly 1% 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 (analogous to the US NSF's POSE programme or Germany's DFG research-software line), plus block funding for institutional RSE teams, converting the RSMF 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 opportunistically against a future spending period rather than an acute emergency.