About Us

D4Science is a digital infrastructure designed to offer diverse communities of practices a comprehensive suite of services through tailored and co-created virtual research environments promoting collaboration and innovation. It is operated as a not-for-profit service. Its development was supported by several EU-funded projects. 

Our virtual research environments support the entire research lifecycle—from data management and analysis to publication and collaboration. By integrating services, tools, and resources, D4Science advances open science practices. Its effectiveness is exemplified through numerous success stories and impactful use cases

 

What Makes D4Science Unique?

 

Open Science Enabler: D4Science is designed to enact open science by providing researchers with an environment where open practices are transparently promoted. It aims to make science more fair, solid, and democratic.

Co-creation Approach: D4Science utilises a co-creation approach, ensuring that the resulting Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are well-matched to the expectations of their designated communities. This fosters a collaborative environment where the platform evolves in response to the needs of its users.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs): D4Science delivers VREs as a Service, which are web-based, community-oriented, collaborative, and user-friendly working environments. VREs are designed to support scientists and practitioners willing to work together on specific research tasks. Each VRE offers a unifying web application with custom pages and menu items, providing a wide range of functionalities.

Reproducibility and Reusability: D4Science is designed to enable the reproducibility and reusability of research processes. It provides tools for capturing research activities and ensuring that every step of the research process can be replicated. The platform also supports the sharing of methods, data, and results, thereby fostering open and transparent science.

Integrated, User-Friendly Services: Our platform integrates multiple tools into cohesive, user-friendly services, accessible to researchers with varying technical expertise. These services cover key research areas, including data analytics, data publishing, data storage, community building, service deployment, and software development, ensuring secure, scalable, and collaborative workflows.

 

Our Infrastructure

D4Science is managed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Its headquarters are hosted by CNR's Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (CNR-ISTI) in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy. 

To ensure high availability and resilience, the D4Science infrastructure is deployed across five geographically distributed sites: the D4Science data center in Pisa, three locations within GARR (the Italian National Research and Education Network), and one at the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This distributed architecture provides access to substantial computing resources: 11,700 CPU cores, 82 TB of RAM, and 1,720 TB of storage.

The new CNR data center in Pisa is designed according to the best practices recommended by the CEN-CENELEC CLC TR50600-99-1 standard, "Data center facilities and infrastructures - Part 99-1: Recommended practices for energy management." Furthermore, it adheres to the "Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact," a self-regulatory initiative by data center and infrastructure operators to contribute to the European Green Deal.

 

Our Journey

From its initial focus on Earth and Marine Sciences, D4Science has evolved into a key digital infrastructure supporting a wide range of scientific disciplines, including Social Sciences, Agri-Food, Humanities, and Health Sciences. The following timeline charts this expansion and highlights key innovations and adaptations in the platform's architecture and services, driven by a commitment to Open Science principles. It showcases D4Science's continuous growth in terms of user base, data processed, and services offered, demonstrating its versatility and dedication to providing cutting-edge solutions for data management, processing, sharing and publishing across diverse research communities.