Understanding and advancing research software grant funding models

Research software funding currently operates across a disconnected landscape of public and private grant-making organizations, leading to inefficiencies for software projects and the broader research community. The lack of coordination forces projects to pursue multiple, often overlapping opportunities, and forces funders to independently evaluate projects and proposals, resulting in duplicated effort and suboptimal resource distribution. By examining existing collaboration models, including centralized and distributed approaches, we highlight how joint decision-making mechanisms could improve sustainability for reusable software resources. An international set of examples illustrates how cross-organization cooperation for research software funding can be structured. Such collaborations can optimize grant disbursement and align priorities. Increased collaboration could allow funders to better address the ongoing maintenance and evolution of research software, lowering barriers that hamper discovery across multiple research domains. Encouraging both bottom-up user-driven and top-down coordination mechanisms ultimately supports more robust, widely accessible research software, improving global research outcomes.