SURF Research Day 2024

Research software management is a young but very active topic. We can imagine an ecosystem of tools and infrastructures via which researchers can easily share, find, use, develop, and collaborate on research software. However, the field might not yet be mature enough to justify the degree of top-down coordination that such an ecosystem requires. We propose to start with building blocks, created in a bottom-up fashion. These building blocks are products created by an institution or group for a purpose relevant to them but shared in the spirit of open science. We illustrate such building blocks via one that we are adopting, the TU Delft Software Licensing Guidelines, and one just released, an evaluation of forges like GitHub and GitLab. We argue how such building blocks could help connect research software, DevOps, and management demands on a local level, with the supply provided by national and international parties.