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On 1 September 2026, the Software Sustainability Institute became the Institute for Research Software. This is a new name and visual identity rather than a new organisation: the same people, programmes, partnerships and commitments continue under the new name, and the Institute’s website, @software.ac.uk email addresses and social media accounts are all unchanged.

The Institute has been a long-standing partner of CAKE and a fixture of the UK’s digital research infrastructure landscape, so we wanted to mark the change here and reflect on why the Institute matters.

Fifteen years of making research software count

The Institute was founded in 2010, with EPSRC funding and a partnership between the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton and Oxford, at a time when research software received relatively little attention or recognition. Software underpinned a huge and growing share of research, yet it was rarely treated as a research output, the people who built it were largely invisible in the academic system, and much of it was fragile and difficult to maintain or reproduce. The original name captured the concern of the day: that software needed to be made sustainable so it could continue to support reliable and reproducible research.

In the years since, the Institute has helped change that picture, and its motto, Better Software, Better Research, has become something of a shorthand for the whole movement. A few of the things it has done stand out:

  • Establishing Research Software Engineering as a profession. The term “Research Software Engineer” was coined at the Institute’s Collaborations Workshop in 2012, and the Institute went on to support the UK RSE community as it grew into the Society of Research Software Engineering, with its own conference, career frameworks and international counterparts. Today RSE groups exist across most UK research-intensive universities, something that would have been hard to imagine in 2010.
  • Building the evidence base. The Institute’s surveys of researchers and RSEs, and its studies of how software is used and cited, gave funders and institutions the data to take research software seriously as an object of policy rather than an afterthought.
  • Shaping policy. The Institute has worked closely with UKRI, the research councils and institutions on how research software is funded, recognised and supported, feeding into everything from software management plans and the UKRI DRI programme to debates on research assessment and the Hidden REF.
  • Growing a community. The annual Collaborations Workshop, the Research Software Camps and the Fellowship Programme have created a national network of people who champion good software practice in their own disciplines and institutions. The Fellowship alumni alone now number in the hundreds, and many of the people leading research software activity in the UK today, including several in the DRI projects we work alongside, came up through it.
  • Improving practice. Through training, the Institute’s role in bringing Software Carpentry and The Carpentries to the UK, guides and consultancy, it has helped countless research groups write software that is more open, better maintained and easier to trust and build upon.

Why the change now

The field has moved a long way since 2010, and the Institute itself has helped drive much of that change. Research software is now widely recognised as both a research output and an essential part of research infrastructure, and Research Software Engineering is an established profession. The Institute’s role has broadened alongside this: it now works not only with the people who create and maintain research software, but with the institutions and funders that shape how that software is recognised and supported.

The new name reflects that broader role and the Institute’s ambition to strengthen research through software. It is explicitly building on its history rather than moving away from it: the Institute will continue to describe itself, where it helps audiences make the connection, as the Institute for Research Software, previously the Software Sustainability Institute. Its brief self-description is now the UK’s leading centre of expertise for research software.