On a global scale, a rich biodiversity informatics infrastructure exists at many different levels, from standards, to software libraries, to national and global data-warehouses. All this infrastructure, however, only truly serves science if someone is using it. A perfectly written standard is a waste of time and energy if it is never applied, and a multi-million dollar software package is a perhaps a poor investment if it only interfaces with a handful of minds. The development of virtual research environments (VRE) are particularly challenging and prone to pitfalls, as at their heart, they are integrative across diverse data-types, and as such require large investments of time and effort to build and maintain.<br> When the community 'solves' one aspect of a VRE, this solution is codified as a standard. To date, within the biodiversity informatics community, these standards almost exclusively address data format and, and to a lesser extent meaning. This makes sense, as a common language is a necessary foundation. However, decades into standards development, we have struggled to get VREs into the hands of researchers. I argue that (among other things) this suggests that the biodiversity informatics community might benefit from a shift of emphasis, from research on data standards to research on software-design standards.<br> I explore these issues from the perspective of a particular class of VRE, digital workbenches for taxonomists. I pick examples from existing and now legacy VREs to highlight the hard work that needs to be done to overcome their pitfalls. I demonstrate that the most impactful work on VREs has come from the ground up, as communities of researchers form around a nucleus of a biologist's software. This may have profound consequences for the opposite type of initiatives, i.e. those that plan from the top down, such as the Distributed System for Scientific Collections, DiSSCo.<br> Finally, we highlight what one initiative, TaxonWorks, is doing in this field. As an ambitious project, with long-term funding, it has much to gain, and perhaps ultimately offer, if the questions on this topic are answered to the benefit of all.
