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.