A virtual scientific community is a group of people, often researchers and students, who share multiple resources related to the scientific field, and whose main medium of communication is the internet.
[1] Examples of such communities include the Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning Portal or the Biomedical Informatics Research Network.
[2] There are numerous scientific repositories and websites in existence that, while useful, do not meet the definition of a virtual scientific community.
Examples of such are data and scientific literature repositories as well as open access journals.
[3]