Research Software Sustainability and Citation
This work tackles the problem of ensuring long-term viability of research software for the scientific community, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing community initiatives.
The paper addresses the challenge of software sustainability by exploring how software citation can incentivize stakeholders and enable reuse, though it notes ongoing technical and social challenges.
Software citation contributes to achieving software sustainability in two ways: It provides an impact metric to incentivize stakeholders to make software sustainable. It also provides references to software used in research, which can be reused and adapted to become sustainable. While software citation faces a host of technical and social challenges, community initiatives have defined the principles of software citation and are working on implementing solutions.