Are you doing research in collaboration with colleagues from other departments and/or universities and are you in need for an environment where you can share, communicate and work? Or are you working with research data and looking for a dedicated and secure way to store and share the data? The University Library offers services to support researchers in their process of collaboration and storage of research data.
Doing research projects with colleagues, and looking for ways to make communication, planning or document sharing easier and more effective? Or is version management a problem when writing collaboratively on publications?
Then, Virtual Research Environments (VRE’s) might be a solution for you.
The University Library facilitates secured working environments especially designed for research projects or research groups A dedicated research environments for communication and collaboration.
The VRE is built upon Sharepoint software, with integration of MS Office functionalities. The VRE has three main supporting pillars:
– Communication tooling: all project related communication takes place in the VRE and is therefore easily traceable; integration possibilities with your desktop calendar (outlook); and in addition also blog functionality and external webpage possibilities for dissemination of project information (and results);
– Storage options of dedicated information and research data belonging to the project, with integration of Endnote or links to data repositories (such as Dataverse, see below), online library and so on, built upon secured access management;
– Collaboration facilities especially focused on collaboratively writing on publications.
Scientific Integrity is one of the corner stones of scientific research. An important issue in this respect is good research datamanagement: which research data have to be stored and registered for reproducibility reasons or have to be made traceable or available for re-use?
The University Library can help you with a datamanagement plan, and offers the possibility to store and register your research data as well. Dataverse Network, a platform developed at Harvard University is a solid environment for storing and sharing research data. The researcher is fully in charge, not only in depositing data but also in giving access rights to others. The research data from Dutch Dataverse Network are being stored at SurfSARA.
FHML School SHE has decided to store all research data of their PHD-students as from 2014 in DDN.
Furthermore, in line with an upcoming code of conduct for good datamanagement at UM, three pilots for storing research data related to publications will give insight in possible differences in datamanagement per discipline.
Are you interested in the collaboration tool, VRE and/or the possibilities of storing and managing your research data via DDN, please contact:
Henk van den Hoogen (h.vandenhoogen@maastrichtuniversity.nl), programme manager Research Support
Erik Jansen, ICT-officer of VRE/DDN
