Over the next few months, a virtual working and research environment will evolve in which research questions may be collaboratively discussed and investigated, with support from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The results deriving from this will be secured in the long term in a quotable format within the publications section of the portal, where they are freely accessible.

As a working tool, the virtual working and research environment provides, alongside key word processing tools, a variety of reliable community-based Web 2.0 functions such as a forum, blog and comment service, as well as a sophisticated file repository. This is intended to contribute to a consistent, research-oriented expansion of the portal's contents while maintaining a high level of quality, thus focusing and exponentiating scholarly findings from the disciplinary and worldwide network of international educational media research.

The Edumeres editorial team invites anyone with an interest in research on textbooks and educational media to use this virtual working and research environment, even now in its trial phase, to assess its efficiency and to share ideas for its further improvement.