VOA3R - The end...

Well, there's not much to say now... the VOA3R project (Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research related to Agriculture, Food, and Environment.), funded from the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), Theme 4 – “Open access to scientific information”, grant agreement n° 250525, is officially over.

I wasn't a VOA3R member from the beginning back in June 2010; I first got involved in the VOA3R project in spring 2011, when I was invited to demonstrate the VOA3R Confolio repository tool in the VOA3R content providers' meeting which was held in the GRNET premises. After that, I started being more actively involved during the summer of 2011, when I was asked to work on the Content Population Methodology deliverable of the project and also participated in the VOA3R Workshop during the EFITA 2011 Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

My first participation in an event as a VOA3R consortium member. VOA3R Workshop, EFITA 2011 Conference

Since then I was seriously involved in the project, working on the coordination of the content population tasks, organizing metadata evaluation sessions with the content providers, checking the metadata and the tools used for the annotation, explaining the process and the tasks. VOA3R was the biggest project that I had participated since then, so it was by opportunity to apply the experiences and methodologies from other smaller projects (mostly LdV) on a larger scale; I hope that I managed to do a good job!

The project provided me with the opportunity not only to meet a lot of really nice partners (like Ilse from ICROFS, with whom we had met a little bit earlier than VOA3R in a meeting of Organic Eprints National Editors) and also to travel to rather nice destinations for the project meetings (Izmir for the 4th PM, Paris for the 5th PM, Limassol for the 6th PM and Rome for the 7th PM). In addition, I was able to publish the outcomes of the VOA3R project in both journals and conferences.

Presenting the VOA3R platform to Greek agricultural researchers in  2011

The VOA3R project was really active during the 3 years of its life. Some of the project's outcomes are the following:

• The VOA3R portal: A Facebook for agricultural researchers, as I used to say earlier, provides an excellent opportunity to publish your scientific profile, join user communities and share experiences etc. and access more than 2,500,000 bibliographic records related to agricultural research.
• The VOA3R metadata AP: Based on the Dublin Core standard, it is a well-defined and thought metadata application profile, which comes in two flavors: A flat one (Level 2) and an advanced one, FRBR-based (Level 4).
• The infrastructure for maintaining an ever-growing network of repositories from agricultural universities and research centers, to act as a part of the established FAO AGRIS Network, including a well-defined affiliation plan.
• A study on the existing review and publication lifecycles and the proposal of alternative ones.
• A metadata aggregation methodology, which may be adapted and reused in the future.
• Publications in several journals and conferences, such as EFITA and MTSR.

One of the last family photos of VOA3R: Limassol, Cyprus, October 2012

The project will be judged in July 2013 during the 2nd and final review meeting, which will take place in Brussels, Belgium. In the meantime, we still have some time to fine-tune some things and finish pending tasks which were ongoing even at the end of the project.

You may find material about VOA3R at the following sites:

• VOA3R Website
• VOA3R social/research networking portal
• VOA3R Wiki (work in progress)
• Join the VOA3R  group at Facebook
• See the VOA3R photos at Flickr
• Follow VOA3R at Twitter!
• Join the VOA3R group at Linkedin
• See VOA3R-related presentations at Slideshare
• See VOA3R-related videos @ YouTube
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment/Workshop @ EFITA 2011
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment in MTSR 2011
• VOA3R Controlled Experiment in MTSR 2012