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

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.