The Institute was founded to support the UK’s research software community - a community that includes the majority of UK’s researchers.

Our mission is to cultivate better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research (better software, better research). Software is fundamental to research: seven out of ten UK researchers report that their work would be impossible without it.

Organised around five teams (community, policy, software, training, and communications) the Institute has built a network of 61 Fellows from across research disciplines; championed software and software career paths through House of Lords, BIS and RCUK reports; worked with over 50 projects to directly improve their codes, written over 80 popular guides; and organised training events to teach over 1,000 learners the basics of software engineering – thus helping thousands of people to build better research software.

The four institutions in the consortium – Edinburgh, Southampton, Manchester, Oxford – represent over 25 years of collaboration on software for research with unparalleled software engineering expertise.

Getting software on the research agenda: we have built a popular platform to provide researchers and developers access to the contacts, information and training necessary to develop reliable and reproducible research software.

Supporting communities that want change: we have formed partnerships across the UK and into Canada, the US, and across Europe, and have become the de facto point of contact for research software good practice.

Increasing skills: we partnered with the international Software Carpentry initiative to help make researchers more productive and their work more reliable.

Improving software: we have worked on projects with research groups across RCUK sectors including: the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, SynthSys, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Policy, CCPs, and DIAMOND. 

If you would like to work with us, please contact info [at] software [dot] ac [dot] uk.