Development of virtual research management ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE (EA) can provide solutions to the current challenges of research management in academic institutions and create necessary capabilities to manage and control the flow of research process among individuals, groups, and institutes. As a new approach to organizational operation, virtual ENTERPRISEs (VE) introduce new business models and management techniques. The aim of this study is to provide ARCHITECTURE for designing and developing virtual research management based on axiomatic design method. For this purpose, first the design framework has been developed by investigating theoretical principles and using content analysis method. In the next step, the components of research management ARCHITECTURE have been extracted based on proposed framework and using axiomatic design method. Finally by surveying experts, the proposed ARCHITECTURE is validated and its application in an Iranian academic institute has been studied as a case. Proposed ARCHITECTURE in this paper can be used in distributed and dynamic academic research environment. Proposing new methodology for research management ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, integrating virtual organization concepts in ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE design, introducing a methodology for identifying research management system requirements, introducing key components in designing and developing research management based on virtual ENTERPRISE are innovation aspects of this research.