Serving scientists in agri-food area by virtual research environments

Agri-food research calls for changes in the practices dealing with data collection, collation, processing and analytics, and publishing thus to fully benefit from and contribute to the Open Science movement. One of the major issues faced by the agri-food researchers is the fragmentation of the 'assets' that can be exploited when performing research tasks, e.g. data of interest are heterogeneous and scattered across several repositories, the tools exploited by modellers are diverse and often rely on local computing environments, the publishing practices are various and rarely aim at making available the 'whole story' with datasets, processes, workflows. This paper presents the AGINFRA+ endeavour to overcome these limitations by providing researchers in three designated communities with Virtual Research Environments facilitating the access to and use of the 'assets' of interest and promote collaboration.