AbstractVirtual research environments are systems called to serve the needs of their designated communities of practice. Every community of practice is a group of people dynamically aggregated by the willingness to collaborate to address a given research question. The virtual research environment provides its users with seamless access to the resources of interest (namely, data and services) no matter what and where they are. Developing a virtual research environment thus to guarantee its uptake from the community of practice is a challenging task. In this article, we advocate how the co‐creation driven approach promoted by D4Science has proven to be effective. In particular, we present the co‐creation options supported, discuss how diverse communities of practice have exploited these options, and give some usage indicators on the created VREs.