JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program provides a series of funding mechanisms to create an ecosystem of open source software (OSS) that serves the needs of cancer research. As the ITCR ecosystem grows substantially, it faces the challenge of long-term sustainability of the software being developed by ITCR grantees. To address this challenge, the ITCR Sustainability and Industry Partnership Working Group (SIP-WG) was convened in 2019.

Objective:

The charter of the SIP-WG is to investigate options to enhance the long-term sustainability of the OSS being developed by ITCR, in part by developing a collection of business model archetypes that can serve as sustainability plans for ITCR OSS development initiatives. The working group assembled models from the ITCR program, from other studies, and via engagement of its extensive network of relationships with other organizations (e.g., Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Open Source Initiative and Software Sustainability Institute) in support of this objective.

Methods:

This article reviews existing sustainability models and describes ten OSS use cases disseminated by the SIP-WG and others, including 3D Slicer, Bioconductor, Cytoscape, Globus, i2b2 and tranSMART, ITK, Linux, OHDSI tools, R, and REDCap, in ten sustainability aspects: governance, documentation, code quality, support, ecosystem collaboration, security, legal, finance, marketing, and dependency hygiene.

Results:

Information available to the public reveals that all ten OSS have effective governance, comprehensive documentation, high code quality, reliable dependency hygiene, strong user/developer support, and active marketing. These OSS include a variety of licensing models (e.g., GPL v2, GPL v3, BSD, Apache 3) and financial models (e.g., federal research funding, industry and membership support, commercial support). However, detailed information about ecosystem collaboration and security is not publicly provided by most OSS.

Conclusions:

We recommend six essential attributes for research software: alignment with unmet scientific needs, a dedicated development team, a vibrant user community, a feasible licensing model, sustainable financial model, and effective product management. We stress important actions to be considered in future ITCR activities that involve discussion of the sustainability models and licensing models for ITCR OSS, establishment of a central library, and allocation of consulting resources to code quality control, ecosystem collaboration, security, and dependency hygiene.