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Scientific opportunities

Collecting, preserving, organizing, and sharing source code at the Software Heritage scale is a challenging undertaking. We are looking forward to collaborations with scientists interested in meeting their match!

Extending the archive

To collect all publicly available source code and keep it current, we need to efficiently discover the many places where source code is made available over the Internet, ingest its content, and track changes.

Evolving the archive

We collect the development histories of source code from many different version control systems. They need to be captured in a generic and extensible data model that will need to stand the proof of time in the very long term.

Connecting the archive

To support scientific dissemination and reproducibility, the source code used in scientific articles needs to be collected in Software Heritage and properly cross referenced with all Open Access platforms.

You can help

If you want to help us tackling the scientific challenges posed by source code preservation at this scale, you may consider participating in Software Heritage research activities. You can start from the following resources:

Mailing list

General discussions about the relationships of the Software Heritage with science at large happen on the public swh-science mailing list. You are more than welcome to join our discussions there!

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Working groups

We host several scientific working groups to discuss and act on the challenges faced by source code collection, long-term preservation, indexing, and more. We are going to start operate working groups incrementally over the next months, but several charters are already available.

Discover the planned working groups