VOA3R
The Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository Project (VOA3R) was a European research project financed through the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union. The project consortium was composed of fourteen partners from ten different countries, as well as representatives from FAO of the United Nations. The general objective of the VOA3R project was to improve the spread of European agriculture and aquaculture research results by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products. The project tasks and work packages carried out innovative experiments with open access to scientific agriculture and aquaculture contents and developed and provided  services that integrated previously existing open access repositories and scholarly publication management systems by means of a federation approach. The key product of the project was the VOA3R platform. Overview of the VOA3R Platform. The VOA3R platform aimed at reusing existing and mature metadata and semantic technology to deploy an advanced community-focused integrated service for the retrieval of relevant open content, and data that includes explicit models of the scholarly methods and procedures used and of the practical tasks targeted by applied research (which represent a principal information need expression for practitioners). The service enabled researchers to formulate their  information needs in terms of elements of the scientific methods established in their field (variables, techniques, assessment methods, kinds of objects of interest, etc.) combined with topical descriptions as expressed in metadata. The community approach enabled the enhancement of information seeking with extended evaluation elements (as for example, ratings, public reviews, social tagging and links to supporting or conflicting reports) that complement and go beyond the traditional, anonymous peer review process which results are not made available openly. The technology used would itself become open source, so that the model of the service could be adopted by enterprises (including SMEs ) or other kinds of institutions as a value-added, community-oriented model for open access content. VOA3R Main Objectives. The general objective of the project was to improve the spread of European agriculture and aquaculture research results by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products. The concrete objectives towards this were the following: