Open science, open government and open data: creating an impact through open online education and Virtual Research Environments

Information and Communication Technolog

Using Open Research Data for Public Policy Making: Opportunities of Virtual Research Environments

Governments and publicly-funded research organisations increasingly make research data available openly. Researchers can use this data in Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to conduct multidisciplinary data-driven research and to obtain new insights potentially for governmental policy-making. However, the requirements for such a VRE are not yet clear. The objective of this study is to elicit and define requirements for a multidisciplinary VRE that integrates Open Government Data (OGD) and open research data for public policy making. Based on a VRE case study, we elicit 13 VRE requirements related to data storage, data accessing, data curation and other aspects, and describe a use case of open data for governmental policy-making. Meeting the requirements results in a VRE that 1) overlays the existing e-Research Infrastructures to provide researchers with integrated open data from different domains, 2) offers OGD in combination with data from publicly-funded research, and 3) stimulates innovation and research collaboration.Information and Communication Technolog

Multidisciplinary Collaboration Through Online Virtual Research Environments (VREs): What do VRE users need?

Making new data combinations and collaborating with researchers from different disciplines are becoming essential ingredients of scientific research. These activities are increasingly contributing to solutions for multidisciplinary global problems, such as climate change and energy transition. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) can potentially support making data combinations and researcher collaborations by providing a multiplicity of data and services. Many VREs have been developed already and are used in specific research domains. However, there is a lack of insight into what is needed to develop a multidisciplinary VRE in comparison with monodisciplinary VREs. This is currently blocking the development of innovative multidisciplinary VREs. This study aims to investigate the requirements for building a multidisciplinary VRE and to study the key differences between monodisciplinary VREs and multidisciplinary VREs. Our study shows that comprehensive requirements in nine categories need to be fulfilled when designing a multidisciplinary VRE. Lack of considering many requirements and limit focus in monodisciplinary VREs hinder the wide use of current VREs in multidisciplinary research.Information and Communication Technolog

How to improve policy making using open data in Virtual Research Environments? An interactive workshop discussing privacy, security and trust strategies

Governments and publicly-funded research institutions increasingly open up data collected and created through research. One way to share and use data obtained through research is through Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Insights obtained through open data use in VREs can subsequently provide input for policy making. However, this process involves many privacy, security and trust issues both for VRE developers and for end-users. We still know very little about what strategies can be used to handle these security, privacy and trust issues. This 1,5 hour interactive workshop aims to discuss and refine strategies for handling privacy, security and trust issues of VREs and their users as developed in the European VRE4EIC project. The workshop will facilitate open discussions making use of the interactive Mentimeter tool to involve all participants in the sharing of practices and in sharing feedback on the strategies.Information and Communication Technolog