Software is often abandoned or shut down, for one reason or another, and whilst research on academic open source software is sparse, there seems little reason to assume it is any different. While some reasons may be straightforward, e.g. a sole maintainer has moved on, or grant funding has ceased - some projects are able to withstand these barriers and may remain active and maintained despite adversity. This study monitored open source projects over the period of a year, measuring common performance indicators, using both subjective and qualitative measures (participant surveys), as well as using scripts to analyse indicators associated with these projects' online source control codebases. We find that these health indicators can not be used as cross project benchmarks, due to the significant variation in context for each project. They can, however, often be useful in signifying changes in a single project's health, providing they are not used to compare between different unrelated projects.

翻译：软件往往因各种原因被遗弃或停用，尽管关于学术开源软件的研究尚不充分，但似乎没有理由认为其情况有所不同。虽然某些原因可能显而易见，例如单一维护者离任或资助资金终止，但有些项目能够抵御这些障碍，仍保持活跃并持续维护。本研究历时一年监测开源项目，通过主观与定性测量（参与者调查）以及脚本分析项目在线源代码管理代码库的相关指标，对常见性能指标进行量化。我们发现，由于每个项目的背景存在显著差异，这些健康指标无法用于跨项目基准对比。然而，只要不用于不同无关联项目之间的比较，它们通常能够有效反映单一项目健康状况的变化。