1. VOA3R
Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: sharing scientific and scholarly research related to agriculture, food, and environment
Oostende, September
Marc Goovaerts , Director
Library Hasselt University

2. Overview VOA3R: An introduction Background Stakeholders
Open Access
Communities of practice
Stakeholders
The VOA3R platform & its services
Repository
Community features
Timeline
New partners - invitation

3. 1. VOA3R – An introduction

4. VOA3R
The VOA3R platform integrates existing open access repositories as well as digital libraries, sharing scientific and open access research related to Agriculture, Food, Aquaculture and Environment.
VOA3R is dedicated to providing a community-oriented platform based on social networking, micro-blogging and social bookmarking.
VOA3R is connected with other European projects: Open Aire, Driver

5. VOA3R – MAJOR OBJECTIVES
Devising and providing a single access point to scholarly research in the area of Agriculture , Aquaculture and related sciences.
Analyzing and modeling research work processes, inputs and outcomes, coming out with a detailed meta-model serving the basis for devising new search and navigation interfaces that are specific to scholarly information needs during their work processes.
Analyzing existing and alternative approaches to the evaluation of scholarly research. Experimenting alternatives to peer review in the context of open access repositories, based on the meta-models for research work developed.
Formalizing meta-models of research work, coming up with ontologies that enable new forms of search and browsing enhanced by existing semantic metadata repository tools.

6. VOA3R
VOA3R 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 14 organizations from 10 European countries and 3 collaborators from external organizations..

7. VOA3R (co-)funding ICT Policy Support Programme aims at
stimulating innovation
and competitiveness
through
wider uptake and
best use of ICT by
citizens,
governments and
businesses.

8. VOA3R Partners UAH (University of Alcala)
AUA (Agricultural University of Athens)
UDE (University of Duisburg-Essen)
GRNET (Greek Research and Technology Network SA)
SLU (Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences)
UHASSELT (Hasselt University)
ICROFS (International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems)
INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural Research)
CULS (Czech University of Life Sciences)
ACTAInfo (ACTA Informatique)
ARI (Agricultural Research Institute)
CINECA (Consorzio Interuniversitario)
TEIA (Technological Educational Institute of Athens)
ACTA (Association de Coordination Technique Agricole)
+ indirectly:
FAO
UNESCO-IOC

9. 2. Background

10. Open Access - 1 Options to collect in VOA3R: Open Access journals
Peer reviewed (see
Repositories:
Universities/Research institutes collect the output in an institutional repository:
Authors version of a published work
Other publications: reports – presentations – maps – audiovisual material - unpublished work – other research projects
The research data of the publications
Conference proceedings in Open Access
Topics: Agriculture - Aquaculture – Environment – related sciences

11. Open Access - 2 Options to collect in VOA3R:
Existing repositories in the VOA3R consortium:
SLU DSPACE and Epsilon Repositories. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden).
ProdInra Repository. INRA (France).
U-GOV Repository. CINECA (Italy)
OceanDocs Repository. UNESCO-IODE
Organic Eprints Repository. ICROFS (Denmark)
WebAGRIS Agricultural Research Institute. ARI (Cyprus)
Other partners will make their collections OAI-PMH compatible (following the VOA3R guidelines)
New partners are invited to join

12. Quality Control & Assessment
Major forms
Peer review based on the Journal System
Assessment - Evaluation: Web of Science as benchmark
New forms:
Why?
Repositories doesn’t have quality control
Internet makes new forms of quality control possible
Evaluation can be based on a broader scale of tools

13. Communities of practice
Identity – the bedrock of social architecture
Profile & Reputation
Presence – the sense of life
Relationships
Contacts & Groups
Norms & Rules
Activity
Sharing - “I share because of a joined passion and interest”
Conversation & Collaboration
No matter how much software we build, people build the relationships, and they build them out of words first!
Otherwise participation devolves into viewership

15. Examples of networking - 1
Linkedln - Professional networking

16. Examples of networking - 2
CiteULike – Zotero
Social bookmarking
Bibliographic tools for individuals – groups -

17. Examples of networking - 3
Mendeley
Bibliographic tools for individuals – groups

18. Examples of networking - 4
MyExperiment – share research objects

19. 3. Stakeholders

20. Who are the stakeholders?
Producers
Consumers
External systems
Researchers
Academics
Practitioners
Students
Information Managers
Decision makers
the Industry
and other organisations
but also: the anonymous web surfer
and certainly: Other systems and services!

21. → model the scholarly process
The producers’ needs
Publishing research online
pre- and post-publish support
Quality control / peer-reviewing
→ model the scholarly process
Make research items more accessible
Support post-publication assessment
Foster post-publication dialogue
Electronic CV
Integration in the research environment

22. The consumers’ needs Information retrieval Information processing
open access
heterogeneous content
locate, search / semantic search
browse
Information processing
online reading: annotations, bookmarks, reading basket
author’s background & other relevant resource
interactivity: comments, annotations, rating

23. 4. The VOA3R platform

24. The VOA3R platform Key objectives Main innovation
Improve the spread of agriculture, aquaculture and environmental research results (European and international)
by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products
a federated approach that integrates existing open access repositories and scholarly publication management systems
Main innovation
Social portal
Community-focused integrated service

25. The VOA3R platform – Home page

26. VOA3R – Search and Browse 1
Different type of search: Tags

27. VOA3R – Search and Browse 2
Different type of search: Timeline

28. VOA3R – Search and Browse 3
Different type of search: Research typology

29. VOA3R – Search and Browse 4
Added value

30. Key features – Repository
High quality content:
VOA3R standard for metadata
Based on Agris AP
Use of ontologies:
FAO Agrovoc thesaurus
Plant ontology
...
VOA3R is committed to exposing its contents as open linked data expressed in RDF
Peer review processes for open access repositories (study)

31. Social Portal - Challenges
The critical point for social networking success
A social network is successful only if it reaches a critical mass of users
Only generalist networks seems successful at the moment (e.g. Linkedln)
Resistance and distrust of researchers
Sharing information in a fully open environment
The older generation has its network and communication tools
A mulitude of networking services are available:
The problem of choice
Maintenance of profiles on different platforms

32. Key features - Social Portal
New specific tools supporting the scientific communication:
Models to retrieve and describe the research information in terms of elements of the scientific methods established in their field (variables, techniques, assessment methods, kinds of objects of interest, etc.)
Integration of data from existing social networks
And classical social portal tools
ratings, public reviews, suggestions
identity and reputation
Facebook
Mendeley
For Science

33. Key features - Social Portal
Research oriented elements

34. Portal: System architecture

35. Main use cases of the VOA3R portal

36. 5. Alternative quality control and peer review

37. Reviewing Lifecycle Services
 VOA3R "Controlled Experiment for Reviewing Lifecycle Services"
You are kindly invited to participate in the next VOA3R Controlled Experiment: Please visit  read one (or more) of the available papers and leave your comment/review as a blog comment! Your feedback is really needed in this experiment!