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.
['Bastian Roth', 'Robin Hecht', 'Bernhard Volz', 'Stefan Jablonski']
Towards a Generic Cloud-Based Virtual Research Environment