With the title Community-based research, knowledge sharing and publication facilitated by VOA3R Christian M. Stracke (eLC / University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany), Diane Le Hénaff (INRA, France), and Miguel-Angel Sicilia (University of Alcalá, Spain) have published an introductory article about VOA3R in the European Magazine FOCUS EUROPE.

VOA3R - Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research related to Agriculture, Food, and Environment is a is a 3-year European project launched in June 2010 and funded by the European Commission under the seventh framework ICT Policy Support Program. It brings together 13 organizations from 10 European countries and 3 collaborators from external organizations.The VOA3R platform was developed and is currently available in a beta-version. It offers an innovative portal that brings together researchers, students and practitioners in agriculture, viticulture and aquaculture and related areas. This platform gathers 500,000 + open access resources from 14 repositories.

Part of the article can be founded here below:

The enormous increase of information and publications through the new media and internet channels demands for new innovative approaches regarding sharing knowledge and research results. The European Union has identified this crucial need and supports several initiatives for a better, equal and open access to knowledge. In the specific field of Agriculture, a community-based platform for sharing and discussing outcomes, methods and projects has been devised, called VOA3R. It offers a virtual place to connect researchers, students and practitioners.

This ambitious approach is being challenged by 13 partners under the VOA3R consortium. VOA3R currently federates open access literature from 13 existing open access repositories and digital libraries across Europe, making use of standard vocabularies and classification schemes. The platform is available for beta use at: http://voa3r.cc.uah.es offering accesses to 500,000 documents with a target up to 2.5 million documents next year.

The VOA3R working team during the 6th Project Meeting in Limassol (Cyprus), OCtober 2012

Documents are classified using standard terminology and individually tagged. Search features are provided: from the standard options (browse, text, author, social) to innovative ones (tag cloud, navigational option using the drag and drop, .timeline and map views). Searches for content in VOA3R rely on unconstrained availability, so the matter of open use is fundamental.

The VOA3R architecture complies with the principles of the Open Archives Initiative interoperability standards for efficient dissemination of content, applying Linked Open Data rules and integrating the semantics of the Agricultural Information Management Standards Agrovoc thesaurus with more than 40,000 concepts in no fewer than 22 languages.

VOA3R encompasses also social networking functionality adding significant value to the content and enlarging the potentialities: Social networking functionalities includes the ability to rate the content of documents, to make annotations and to enter reviews; newsfeeds, microblogging and social bookmarking are also supported. Users can join groups, subscribe to newsfeeds, and ‘like’ any items. The system also allows users to enter personal contact and history data, which is managed alongside their research contributions, so their peers and other users can contact them online or offline for discussions and to share ideas.

In the next year, the VOA3R partners want to push the platform development more in the direction of Linked Open Data including advanced interlinking features and multi-vocabulary support for navigational search. Finally, VOA3R establishes a European Open Access Association: For a future of research with unlimited openness.

Website of the VOA3R consortium: http://voa3r.eu/