Bill Branan
Director, Digital Research and Curation Center and Open Source Programs Office
Johns Hopkins University
Megan Forbes
Program Manager, Open Source Programs Office
Johns Hopkins University
Chelle Sanders
Program Manager
Software Preservation Network
Building a Research Software Support Network
Research software, code that allows researchers to collect or generate new data or to analyze and make meaning of existing data, is essential to modern scholarship. Unfortunately, support resources for researchers who create and maintain software remain fragmented at most institutions. With generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Open Source Programs Office at Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with partners in Research IT, Technology Transfer, and Data Science and AI, is leading the establishment of a collaboratively governed Research Software Support Network (RSSN), a centralized resource hub connecting researchers to essential support services through an ecosystem of service providers distributed across the institution. Rather than creating new services, the RSSN makes existing support more discoverable and accessible, providing pathways to expertise, tools, and best practices, and enabling researchers and software engineers of all skill levels to create more robust and sustainable research software. This interactive briefing will share learnings and outcomes from RSSN’s first year, including needs analyses of research software engineers, researchers who write software, and service units; service provider identification, outreach, and community building strategies; the first iteration of a research software assessment process for matching researchers with service units; and RSSN’s opening conversations about long-term, community-based governance. The resources and tools developed so far are all freely available for sharing and adaptation, and the program team is eager to hear from attendees about strategies used at their own campuses to tackle similar challenges.
Sunsetting as Stewardship: A Framework for Closing with Care
Sunsetting was not part of the Software Preservation Network’s (SPN’s) founding conversation. Organizations are built to last—or at least that’s the implicit assumption baked into most strategic plans, member recruitment pitches, and grant applications. But what happens when an organization has done what it set out to do? Or when the ecosystem has shifted in ways that make continuation less meaningful than closure? Or when the honest answer is that the energy, resources, and community trust carried by an organization would do more good somewhere else? These are the questions that SPN’s Transition Team sat with as it began its sunsetting process in early 2026. And in sitting with them, something became clear: even discussing closure is taboo in the nonprofit sector, leaving little documentation of what it looks like to do it well, i.e., with intention, with values intact, and with an eye toward what the field needs next. That gap is part of what SPN hopes to address. This is the account of an organization at the end of its lifecycle, and how SPN is embracing this final act and working to preserve everything worth keeping. The presentation will include discussion of the importance of developing a sunsetting strategy, share strategies for composting resources to bring new life to the work in the future, and describe how SPN is still working toward community development as it closes down operations.
https://ospo.library.jhu.edu/services/rssn/
https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/thoughtful-sunset-for-the-software-preservation-network/
https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/sunsetting-as-stewardship-a-framework-for-closing-with-care/
https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/composting-the-work-how-spn-approached-values-aligned-asset-disposition/
