Software is pervasive in modern research, enabling the generation, analysis and/or presentation of research outputs. Research software is a key driver of innovation and the economy. It focuses on software that is developed to serve a research purpose, rather than the standard software that some researchers also use for research purposes.

While software has started to be recognised internationally as a key part of facilitating trusted, reproducible research outputs and open science, recognition of research software as a valuable research input and output has lagged behind that of research data. AI-driven research is also dependent on software, although it is not always adequately understood that data preparation and model training are performed by software, and that models are implemented in software.

Significant effort is still needed to influence culture change towards research software across a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers, and to develop and promote standards for developing research software that meets the needs of reliable, reproducible, and reusable research.

An upcoming event within the RS community will soon be organized to better engage change-makers, leaders and decision-makers from a range of stakeholder groups within the research software community, with equal representation of policy makers, national/international RSE associations, infrastructure providers, funders, university consortia, thematic communities (e.g. training), publishers, researchers on research software, etc.

In this meeting attendees will give their input on what are the topics and challenges that are important to be discussed in the future event.