Research projects and what are the current practices that address them? What are the factors, inner workings and practices that influence the success or failure of open-source research projects? This research will provide actionable insights about best practices of open source research software based on empirical evidence collected by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The applied methods may involve (but are not limited to) conducting in-depth interviews with open-source developers and mining software repositories. The candidate will work with several ESI researchers who have a great interest in community building around research software. Moreover, active communication with open source practitioners is expected.