Supporting developers of open-source research software at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø. Apply for up to £10000 worth of professional research software engineering support.
What is the Open-Source Enhancement Fund?
Applications are now closed and will open 9 am (UK time) 1st July 2026. Keep an eye on this webpage.
Each year we set aside resources to support the development of open-source research software at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø. Equivalent to ~£10000, the Open-Source Enhancement Fund (OSEF; formerly "Open-Source Booster") was created to encourage and foster open-source software developed by research groups or individuals throughout the university, with the aim to increase its quality, impact and sustainability*.
If you have open-source research software that you wish to improve some aspect of, or software that you aim to make open-source and would like guidance on how to publish a professional software repository, you can get support from the Research Software Engineering team through the Open-Source Enhancement Fund.
Types of Support
The support can take on a variety of forms, but is fundamentally to encourage the adoption of open research practices to software development. A non-exhaustive list of examples can be found below, which are not mutually exclusive; it may be possible to address parts of more than one of these at a time, depending on your software.
Options available
- Software deployment to a package repository or hosting site
- Integration of software quality assurance tooling
- Addition of documentation infrastructure
- Development of a test suite
- Addition of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows
- Paper pre-submission assessment
- Audit of software quality and/or performance
We can help to ensure your software is easy to deploy on the appropriate platform - typically other researchers’ computers. This deployment process might range from straight-forward to highly complex, depending on the nature and number of dependencies of your software. For the most complex cases, a standard software project might be required.
The specific activities to carry out depend on the programming language(s) of your software, but may follow something like:
- Set up a versioning system.
- Set up an automated building and deployment system, normally via GitHub Actions or similar.
- Deploy the software to PyPI (for Python packages) in source and wheel form (when possible).
- Deploy the package to conda-forge (Python, C++ and Fortran).
- Ensure installation instructions are correct and clear.
We can add software quality assurance tools to your project, and have these tools run as part of your software development and build workflows. To ensure your codebase follows software engineering best practices, we can integrate tools such as:
- Version control
- Code formatters
- Code linters
- Static analysers
- Automated testing
This option puts in place the infrastructure to build and deploy the documentation for the software using or , to be agreed at the start of the project.
Underlying documentation tools that could be setup, depending on the programming language and complexity, include:
- Sphinx
- Pdoc
- MKDocs
- Doxygen
Most of this task focuses on training the researchers on how to populate the documentation with the relevant information.
We can help to build a set of tests for your software, which help ensure that, for example, each component does what you expect it to (unit tests), and that the components work together in the expected way (integration tests).
- Help develop software tests
- Combine tests into test suites
- Automate test execution
- Integrate tooling to assess code coverage
We can help integrate CI/CD workflows into your software repository, which provides users and developers alike with the latest and greatest version, as well as enabling a smoother development process. Such a workflow typically performs the following steps to ensure that the latest changes are ready for release:
- All software tests are passing
- All quality assurance checks completed successfully
- Documentation builds successfully
We can also implement tooling to ensure that your software dependencies are kept up-to-date, if desired.
We can support the publication of research papers that present results obtained with your software by validating those results, facilitating citation of your software in the paper, and ensuring your software is usable by potential reviewers or readers to reproduce your results. This may involve:
- Assessing the software-related claims made in a research paper
- Checking the reproducibility of the results presented (produced by the software)
- Ensuring installation and usage instructions are correct and clear. Some minor updates of the installation procedure might recommended done here if deemed necessary, but the purpose of this task is not to refactor the installation process - see the “Software deployment” option for that.
- Archiving the software with a DOI (with Zenodo). Note that the repository will be made open source at this stage if not open already, using a BSD-3 license unless agreed otherwise. See the section about Legal Information.
- Adding instructions about how to cite the software correctly
We can provide a high-level review of the software repository as a whole, providing detailed feedback for the developers to action on aspects such as:
- End user documentation
- Technical/developer documentation
- Code style and standards
- Use of appropriate tooling and design patterns
- Profiling and performance assessment (depending on the software complexity and time permitting)
A report will be produced and/or issues in the software repository open to guide the developers in the implementation of the key aspects identified during the audit.
In all cases, appropriate training and knowledge transfer is provided, so you can take over the maintenance and further development of the project once the collaboration is completed.
When applying for the OSEF, you will need to describe the type of support you would like to make use of, but you may wish to consider our other avenues of support to see if one of those is more suitable for what you want to achieve. If your aim does not obviously fit one of the themes listed in the examples above, you are welcome to contact us to discuss whether your case would make a suitable application.
Some of the tasks may scale with the complexity of the software, and the OSEF may therefore not be sufficient to complete the proposed tasks with the available funds. This is one of the selection criteria considered when awarding the fund (see below).
Case studies of projects supported in previous rounds of the fund:
Award value
The total value of the fund is ~£10000, which enables 22 days worth of support. Depending on the number, strength and scope of applications received, we may support more than one project (up to four), in which case, that value will be divided amongst them according to their scope.
Applying for the fund
The call for applications opens at the beginning of July, closing at the end of August. The collaboration lasts a year, with mutually compatible timelines to be agreed upon. The figure below details the phases of the process.
In reviewing your application, we will need to consider the following aspects:
- The value and impact of the software is well justified
- The software has not already benefitted from the Open-Source Enhancement Fund
- The RSE Team has the appropriate expertise to support your aims
- The desired outcome is achievable in the time available
- The Open-Source Enhancement Fund is the best route to improve this software
We welcome applications from researchers at any stage of their career - indeed, this can be an excellent opportunity for early career researchers to gain experience in writing grant applications, alongside the opportunity to present their software at our annual Research Computing Showcase Day.
Applicants for this fund can have their project included in the to increase their visibility and impact.
In the spirit of open source, we request that you acknowledge our support through this fund in publications related to your software.
*In the context of (research) software, 'sustainability' refers to the software itself, i.e. the longevity of the codebase, rather than environmental sustainability (e.g. the carbon footprint of running the software).