2026-06-03 –, January Breakout Room
Open science depends on open source research software—but most of it isn’t built to last. Drawing on findings from a U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored Apereo Foundation-hosted workshop, this session explores why research software struggles to persist and how to sustain it. We’ll examine funding, practices, and community models, and share practical approaches, including recognizing software as scholarship, supporting as infrastructure, and improving attribution and discoverability, in order to make open science durable, scalable, and truly collaborative.
Open Science is not just a policy shift—it is an infrastructure transformation. At its core is open source research software, the digital backbone enabling reproducibility, collaboration, and discovery. Yet despite its critical role, much of this software remains fragile: underfunded, undervalued, and often abandoned.
Drawing on findings from a U.S. National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sponsored workshop, this session explores what it will take to sustain open source as the foundation of modern research (report here) The workshop, hosted by Apereo Foundation and Ithaka S+R, brought together leaders across academia, industry, and open source software communities to examine why research software struggles to persist—and how we can change that.
We’ll unpack key challenges identified by participants, including the lack of institutional incentives to treat software as scholarship, the difficulty of tracking impact and adoption, fragmented ownership models, and the cultural gap between researchers and open source practitioners. We’ll also highlight emerging solutions: funding software as infrastructure rather than short-term projects, integrating students into open source ecosystems as a workforce pipeline, establishing campus-wide coordination through OSPOs and/or foundations, and developing standards for discoverability, attribution, and trust.
More broadly, this session reframes sustainability as a multi-dimensional problem—spanning motivation, infrastructure, archival practices, and community. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how open source practices—from version control to community governance—can be adapted to meet the needs of science at scale.
Whether you’re building research tools, shaping institutional policy, or contributing to open science communities, this talk offers a roadmap for turning open source from a byproduct of research into a durable, shared foundation for it.
Patrick currently serves as the Executive Director of the Apereo Foundation. Before Apereo, Patrick served as General Manager at the Open Source Initiative after working within higher education IT for over twenty years, including roles as CIO within the State University of New York and CTO at the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President.
Patrick is an adjunct instructor at The State University of New York at Albany's College of Computing and Information, and frequently speaks on open-source software, open education, and educational technology. Patrick is the co-founder of EDUCAUSE's "Openness" Constituency Group and served on his local school board from 2014-2018.