What do we mean by a "software deposit"? What does a software deposit need to contain to enable it to allow other researchers to inspect, replicate, reproduce and reuse the research, as manifested in the software, in the short term and inspect the software, for the historical record, in the long term. This guide describes what a software deposit should include, in terms of three types of deposit: a minimal deposit (with a README, source code, copyright, licence and contributors information), a runnable deposit (with additional user documentation and sample data) and a comprehensive deposit (providing a rich set of code, data and documentation relating to the software).

This work was funded by Jisc. The Software Sustainability Institute is supported by EPSRC grant EP/H043160/1 and EPSRC/BBSRC and ESRC grant EP/N006410/1.