Sharing Tales of the Dutch Revolt in a Virtual Research Environment

Isaac Newton famously postulated that scientific progress is made when researchers are able to “stand on the shoulder of giants.”1 For modern scientists, the possibilities to stand on the shoulders of others, and to benefit from what colleagues have accomplished, have been extended immensely in recent decades as a result of continuous technological advances. Olson et al. (2008) note that the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science can be demonstrated by tracing co-authorship patterns and by pointing at the steady rise in the number of multi-investigator grant proposals (p. 1). In the natural sciences, the impetus to collaborate largely emerged from the dramatic growth in the volume of digital data. Measuring devices and other instruments increasingly produce computer-readable data, and when scientists process and analyse these data, they mostly use digital research tools, thus producing additional datasets. Various initiatives have been developed to ensure that research data can be archived digitally so that they do not get lost and that they can be reused. At the moment, researchers who initiate new research projects have access to enormous quantities of existing academic resources, and, as a consequence, larger and more complex forms of enquiry become possible. Suc