The global impact of science gateways, virtual research environments and virtual laboratories

Abstract

Science gateways, virtual laboratories and virtual research environments are all terms used to refer to community-developed digital environments that are designed to meet a set of needs for a research community. Specifically, they refer to integrated access to research community resources including software, data, collaboration tools, workflows, instrumentation and high-performance computing, usually via Web and mobile applications. Science gateways, virtual laboratories and virtual research environments are enabling significant contributions to many research domains, facilitating more efficient, open, reproducible research in bold

Tackling the Challenges of 21st-Century Open Science and Beyond: A Data Science Lab Approach

“…Barker and colleagues 14 illustrate how work on science gateways (interpreted broadly) has had considerable research impact with a growing number of conferences, initiatives, and journal special issues. The benefits reported include lowering barriers to computational infrastructure, enabling collaborations, sharing of resources, promotion of open science, and support for cross-disciplinary research.…”

The Australian Research Data Commons

“…This is notable in research areas including Antarctic research, marine research, and astronomy, and has seen major international co-investment in projects such as the Square Kilometre Array. Australia has also contributed to a number of international digital data and eResearch platform initiatives: a major role in establishing the Research Data Alliance; contributions to the international development of virtual laboratories, science gateways and Virtual Research Environments (Barker et al, 2019); development of strong partnerships on research clouds; and building of national research data librarian networks that are international exemplars. This international leadership role continues, with ARDC now driving strong partnerships on broader identification technologies, including supporting the development of Research Activity Identifiers (RAiD) to provide a robust mechanism for identifying where research activities are located, who is collaborating and what resources are being used.…”

Widening the Circle of Engagement Around Environmental Issues using Cloud-based Tools

“…Through building the EVOp portal as a virtual research environment [54], we were able to successfully lower the barrier for various user groups by providing universal access to models and data, means of executing models and manipulating data, and interpreting and sharing results. Outside of the technical lessons already discussed, a number of lessons were learned through the EVOp project, which we believe would be valuable to the wider distributed computing community.…”