Research Software is software that is developed within academia and used for the purposes of research: to generate, process and analyse results. This includes a broad range of software, from highly developed packages with significant user bases to short programs written by researchers for their own use.
Software sustainability describes the practices, both technical and non-technical, that allow software to continue to operate as expected in the future. A constant level of effort is required to maintain the software’s operation.
Software preservation is an approach to extend the lifetime of software that is no longer actively maintained.
Software archiving is one important aspect of software preservation. It is the process of storing a copy of software so that it may be referred to in the future. For example, for the purposes of reproducibility, to store a copy of the exact software that was used to generate a result in a publication.