Beyond the Grave: An Empirical Study of Dormancy and Revival in Scientific Open-Source Software (opens in new tab)

Background. Inactivity thresholds classify scientific open-source software (OSS) as abandoned but cannot distinguish permanent abandonment from temporary dormancy; moving the cutoff from 1 to 36 months changes the abandoned count in the SciCat corpus from 18,030 to 8,010. Aims. We characterize dormancy causes, revival mechanisms, recovery durability, and lifecycle archetypes in dormant-revived scientific OSS. Method. From 18,247 SciCat repositor...