How can you increase your
research competitiveness?

One way in which you could increase your research competitiveness is to collaborate with other universities and researchers as often research challenges could be too big for a single university to tackle. By sharing resources such as people, data, computing power and software over the internet large data sets and enormous computing power allows researchers to tackle challenges that would otherwise be problematic.

We’ve found that supporting the development of online environments specifically for research such as virtual research environments gives collaborators anywhere access to the same resources which can lead to new or faster results.

One of our projects found this when an international team of scholars overthrew a 100-year-old interpretation of a Latin inscription using technologies to work simultaneously on a digitally-enhanced image of the inscription.

Reading JISC’s Virtual Landscape Study on what makes a successful virtual research environment will give you a good understanding of the cultural as well as the technical aspects to think about.

We’ve also found that, although each virtual research environment must be custom-designed to suit the needs of individual teams, they all share key characteristics and benefit from a similar approach to how they are built and used.

Tips for building a virtual research environment include:

Start with a good analysis of user requirements. The JISC-funded Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities (BVREH) project developed a methodology for doing this. Alternatively, employ a social scientist to map the research process.

Analyse the resources already available within your institution including the university’s systems and infrastructure you could build on.

Scan the literature for other VREs that might solve the main needs you have listed. The landscape study, which lists most of the present international VREs, and the JISC VRE programme are good places to start.

Keep your users involved with developments throughout. You are growing the community surrounding the VRE, as well as building the technology.

Research teams spread over sites, or even continents, can hold virtual face-to-face meetings using the video-conferencing service run by JANET(UK). JANET also supports users of the Access Grid, a video-conferencing facility that allows participants to work simultaneously on common tasks, such as the annotation of a document.

Another way to for researchers to pool their resources is through the The National Grid Service. This gives researchers access to pooled computational resources, such as computing power, data and software, from their own desktops. It also joins up with national and international supercomputers and other computing grids. You can contribute your own organisation’s resources by joining as a partner, or join as an affiliate to use the service. Find out more about virtual research environments.

Digital technologies can help education organisations find appropriate partners, manage collaborations online and share resources securely. We recommend that all work with external partners needs to be managed within the context of an institution-wide approach. You might find our guide on how to build a strategy for engaging with business and the community a good starting point.

Our guidance and toolkit on how to promote your research expertise online will help you to make the best use of online channels to communicate the expertise of your researchers to potential business and community partners. If you use the self-assessment tool to assess your current provision it will help you to identify gaps and areas for improvement. We have also extended our way of sharing online resources securely through federated access management which makes it easy for you to allow trusted external partners to access resources they need.

Working with external partners also raises many legal issues, for example around intellectual property rights, data protection and privacy, and the use of public infrastructure by private organisations. JISC Legal has advice and guidance to help.

JISC’s open source software advisory service (OSS Watch) has drawn on experience gained with open software development to produce several briefing documents which explore the lessons for research collaboration in general. This briefing paper on how to build a research infrastructure which is based on the needs of your community is a good starting point.