Towards a Generic Cloud-Based Virtual Research Environment

Virtual collaboration is an important aspect for the success of scientific projects, especially if participating researchers are distributed over the whole globe. In the recent past some systems - so called virtual research environments - were presented to support collaborative work restricted to certain research domains. Within this article a concept of a generic framework for building personal, cloud-based virtual research environments easily is proposed. Such an environment could be defined by composing arbitrary services, appropriate to the requirements of a particular scientist. Due to low funds in some scientific areas, we also provide a flexible billing strategy using the cloud specific pay-per-use model. Thus, each service has just to be paid as long as it is utilized.