Virtual research environments co-creation: The D4Science experience

Virtual research environments are systems called to serve the needs of their designated communities of practice. Every community of practice is a group of people dynamically aggregated by the willingness to collaborate to address a given research question. The virtual research environment provides its users with seamless access to the resources of interest (namely, data and services) no matter what and where they are. Developing a virtual research environment thus to guarantee its uptake from the community of practice is a challenging task. In this article, we advocate how the co-creation driven approach promoted by D4Science has proven to be effective. In particular, we present the co-creation options supported, discuss how diverse communities of practice have exploited these options, and give some usage indicators on the created VREs.