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

Abstract

Abstract-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.Open data; Virtual Research Environment; VRE; policy making; research infrastructure

The Uptake of Open Science: Mapping the Results of a Systematic Literature Review

“…The implication of the close relationship between OG and OS data is an opportunity to link them more effectively by ICT in order to facilitate scientific data-driven government decisions and policies, scientific discoveries, and innovative public services [28].…”

Building a Reference Architecture for Virtual Research Environments

“…Some scholars refer to the complete stack of software, data, computing resources, and sensors available to a researcher through a GUI. Others use the term VRE to refer only to an integrating 'hub', composed of a user interface component, a metadata catalogue and an integrating system (e.g., Zuiderwijk et al, 2016). In the second definition the integrating system assembles and provides components which access (via metadata) assets such as datasets, services, software components, workflows, computing facilities and sensors (we call these assets VRE resources).…”

Advancing the open science movement through sustainable business model development

“…Maintenance will necessitate resources and processes to accept new user requests, respond to user questions, etc. Prior literature has identified virtual research environments and boundary organizations as key enablers of university-industry collaboration for research data sharing and commercialization (Grayling, 2009;Candela et al, 2013;Perkmann and Schildt, 2015;Zuiderwijk et al, 2016). Both these enablers allow scientists to share their data with stakeholders from academia, government and industry, to integrate datasets and to make new scientific discoveries, potentially leading to open innovation in the form of commercialized new products and services.…”

“…Prior research has suggested using a virtual research environment (VRE) to foster the transfer of research data from university to industry and its exploitation to generate new data sets, information and knowledge. A VRE acts as an online system, enabling collaborative research activities beyond geographical borders and providing researchers with tools to manage complex tasks (Candela et al, 2013; Grayling, 2009; Zuiderwijk et al, 2016). The online system should have integrated tools for searching, accessing, integrating data and fostering collaboration among researchers (Zuiderwijk et al, 2016).…”