The VOA3R platform aims to provide an online social networking platform that will use metadata and semantics technology to deploy an advanced, community-focused integrated service for open sharing and retrieval of research content and data. It will allow users to express their research activities using explicit models of the scholarly methods and procedures used and of the practical tasks targeted by applied research.

The VOA3R social platform aims to also enable 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 will enable 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.

An initial prototype of the VOA3R platform has been set up by the VOA3R team for preliminary testing and experimentation: http://voa3r.cc.uah.es