Virtual Research Environments

From data management system to VRE

In the Netherlands, several universities, universities of applied sciences and university medical hospitals are creating virtual working environments (VREs) for researchers (SURF, 2019). VRE's continue to build where data management systems stop. Data management systems first house temporary files that researchers can work on together and for which it is not yet clear whether they (or which part of them) will be included in a long-term archive. After that, and in addition, it imay be possible to automatically archive or publish the data with the push of a button. We will speak about data archiving and data publication in more detail in chapter V.

Examples of data management environments are:

• Dataplatform
  More than 30 Dutch municipalities make use of CKAN (n.d.) software in their Dataplatform (Civity, n.d.).
• OpenEarth 
  OpenEarth (n.d.) is an open source initiative to store and share data, models and tools in the field of marine and coastal engineering. It is a successful initiative that originated in the research community itself and is adopted and used worldwide.
• YODA (Utrecht University, 2018)
  YODA is the data management system for Utrecht University. The next step for YODA is to further develop it into a true VRE (Utrecht University, 2019)with access to a wide range of applications that support and accelerate research. Utrecht University will investigate whether SURF's ResearchCloud  (n.d.a and n.d.b.) will fit the purpose.

VREs in development

Leiden (Leiden University, n.d.), Groningen (University of Groningen, 2019) and Maastricht (Maastricht University, n.d.) have a VRE up and running. Erasmus MC, UMC Utrecht and Radboudumc are also making progress with their VRE (SURF, 2019b). They are in the process of implementing and further developing anDREa - the name of their VRE - worldwide. The illustration below gives an impression of how anDREa supports researchers at different stages of the research cycle.