Academic OSPOs in France: Pathways for Structuring Research Software Support in Institution

Software is a cornerstone of scientific research. It lies at the heart of research processes in nearly all disciplines. Yet researchers who develop software, often self-taught, remain largely unsupported when facing the many related challenges, whether technical, legal, or concerning dissemination. In most institutions, there is no dedicated structure to assist them.

This is precisely the role of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in academic settings: to provide scientific communities with an institutional support point for the development, sharing, and sustainability of their software. Already present in several North American and European research institutions through the CURIOSS network, academic OSPOs are beginning to emerge in France with the inauguration, in September 2025, of the first one at Université Grenoble Alpes.

A Workshop to Build a Common Framework

On the occasion of this inauguration, a workshop brought together around thirty participants from various backgrounds, with the goal of collectively defining the contours of a model for future French academic OSPOs. The synthesis of this work has just been published and constitutes a valuable resource for any institution wishing to establish such a structure.

What role for an OSPO in a research institution?

The report highlights the broad scope of needs that an academic OSPO, dedicated to software developed in research laboratories, can address. A researcher wishing to distribute their software faces legal questions (which licence to choose? how to protect intellectual property while encouraging reuse?), technical issues (how to structure a repository, set up continuous integration, ensure code quality?), documentation challenges (how to describe software using appropriate metadata standards, reference it in HAL, archive it in Software Heritage?), and community concerns (how to sustain a project beyond the thesis or contract under which it was created?).

Today, these questions often lack a clearly identified contact point within institutions. The OSPO is designed to fill this gap by offering a single entry point, capable of directing each request to the appropriate expertise.

But the challenge goes beyond individual support. OSPOs help make an institution’s software output visible, catalogue it, and link it to other scientific outputs: publications and datasets. They are a key component of the institution’s open science policy.

An Expanded Scope to Include “Inner Source”, meaning beyond publicly released open-source software

The “inner source” dimension – the adoption of open-source development practices, including for internal or proprietary development – expands the OSPO’s mission beyond publicly released open-source software. It is important that OSPOs position themselves more broadly as centers of software expertise in order to support scientific communities in all contexts.

Proposals from the workshop

The synthesis addresses the various dimensions discussed during the workshop:

• institutional positioning,
• required skills,
• services to be deployed,
• interactions with the national, international, and non-academic ecosystems.

It also identifies future priorities, such as building a national framework with shared principles, addressing tool sovereignty – particularly software forges – especially at the European level, recognizing software contributions in career evaluation, and defining performance indicators to measure the impact of OSPOs.

Conclusions

This document aims to guide institutions considering the creation of an OSPO or the structuring of existing services, by offering a set of concrete elements drawn from discussions among stakeholders with diverse and complementary experiences and perspectives.

The path toward a national network of academic OSPOs has been laid out. This report is its first building block.

Link to the document: Academic Open Source Program Offices in France, https://hal.science/hal-05554225