D4Science

D4Science is an organisation operating a Data Infrastructure offering a rich array of services by community-driven virtual research environments. 
In particular, it supports communities of practice willing to implement open science practices.
The infrastructure follows the system of systems approach, where the constituent systems (Service providers) offer “resources” (namely services and by them data, computing, storage) assembled together to implement the overall set of D4Science services. 
In particular, D4Science aggregates “domain agnostic” service providers as well as community-specific ones to build a unifying space where the aggregated resources can be exploited via Virtual research Environments and their services.
This organization is hosted by the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione of National Research Council (Italy). 
At the earth of this infrastructure there is an Open Source Software named gCube system.
Services.
D4Science offers a rich array of services:
The D4Science Infrastructure is serving thousands of users (more than 15,000 registered users in April 2021) by 165 active VREs offered via 19 Science gateways.
History.
The D4Science initiative has been developed and supported by several European projects.
DILIGENT (2004-2007) in the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development was the forerunner where a testbed infrastructure built by integrating digital library and grid computing technologies and resources was conceived and developed to serve the needs of communities of practice involved in knowledge development.
In the context of the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration the development of the D4Science initiative started with the support of D4Science (2008-2009), D4Science-II (2009-2011), ENVRI (2011-2014), EUBrazilOpenBio (2011-2013), iMarine (2011-2014). In this period the infrastructure was established and developed to serve communities of practices from domains ranging from Earth Science to Marine Science with worldwide scope
In the context of the H2020 research and innovation programme the maturity level of the D4Science infrastructure was high enough to allow a large and very diverse set of communities of practice to benefit from it and its services and further contribute to its development. 
Moreover, the services offered by the infrastructure have been developed to support open science practices. 
The following projects contributed to D4Science development: BlueBRIDGE (2015-2018), EGIEngage (2015-2017), ENVRIplus (2015-2019), Parthenos (2015-2019), SoBigData (2015-2019), AGINFRAplus (2017-2019), PerformFish (2017-2022), ARIADNEplus (2019-2022), EOSC-Pillar (2019-2022), DESIRA (2019-2023), RISIS2 (2019-2022). Supported communities and cases range from Agri-food 
to Social Data Science 
, Earth Science 
and Marine Science.