Including funding for research software maintenance in grant proposals

[Dr-G]

Discussion topic: Including funding for research software maintenance in grant proposals

Brief description of issue/challenge: Typically grant-funding institutions only want to pay for new software features rather than maintenance of existing research software (no matter how fundamental or widely-used). Is there a way to effectively build support for software maintenance into grant proposals?

Lead/moderator:

Links to resources: "The NIH has discontinued its 'Continued Maintenance and Development of Software' program. There is a collection of other NIH programs but whether as a written or unwritten rule, they all emphasize new developments rather than maintenance and support." ~Anne Carpenter via email correspondence

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/rfi/NIH-Strategic-Plan-for-Data-Science.pdf https://github.com/JasonJWilliamsNY/2018_nih_datascience_rfi Note that for the above, responses are due April 2nd, 2018.

[kyleniemeyer]

Some ideas from a discussion on supporting a software project I'm involved with: project teams can offer individual support plans at standardized rates, that would give people quotable amounts to budget under "computer services" or "consulting" categories on grants.

[11fish]

In an academic setting, it's hard to get personnel to maintain software in the long term even if the funding problem is solved.

[Dr-G]

@11fish I'd like to hear more on this; from my understanding the funding issue is the key problem — if getting folks to do the (paid) work is an issue, I'd like to know more about it.

[11fish]

Personnel tends to means students who come and go.

[Dr-G]

@11fish relates to #6 — postdocs/students tend to have more "free time" for programming/development work