  Today, scientific research is increasingly data-centric and
compute-intensive, relying on data and models across distributed sources.
However, it still faces challenges in the traditional cooperation mode, due to
the high storage and computing cost, geo-location barriers, and local
confidentiality regulations. The Jupyter environment has recently emerged and
evolved as a vital virtual research environment for scientific computing, which
researchers can use to scale computational analyses up to larger datasets and
high-performance computing resources. Nevertheless, existing approaches lack
robust support of a decentralized cooperation mode to unlock the full potential
of decentralized collaborative scientific research, e.g., seamlessly secure
data sharing. In this work, we change the basic structure and legacy norms of
current research environments via the seamless integration of Jupyter with
Ethereum blockchain capabilities. As such, it creates a Decentralized Virtual
Research Environment (D-VRE) from private computational notebooks to
decentralized collaborative research ecosystem. We propose a novel architecture
for the D-VRE and prototype some essential D-VRE elements for enabling secure
data sharing with decentralized identity, user-centric agreement-making,
membership, and research asset management. To validate our method, we conducted
an experimental study to test all functionalities of D-VRE smart contracts and
their gas consumption. In addition, we deployed the D-VRE prototype on a test
net of the Ethereum blockchain for demonstration. The feedback from the studies
showcases the current prototype's usability, ease of use, and potential and
suggests further improvements.
