Open Science
The VOA3R research project, 2010 to 2013
A factual record of the European research project that previously used this domain - what it set out to do, what it produced, and why this site is not its successor.
Between 2010 and 2013 this domain belonged to a European research project called VOA3R - Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository. This page records what that project was, because the domain’s history is a legitimate question for anyone who arrives here from an old citation.
This site is not that project. It is an independent portal, run by a different owner, that happens to occupy the same domain and works on an adjacent subject. Nothing published here is connected to, produced by, or endorsed by the former consortium, its member institutions, or the European Commission.
What the project was
VOA3R was funded under the European Commission’s ICT Policy Support Programme, within the theme “Open access to scientific information”, under grant agreement number 250525. It ran from 2010 and concluded its funded period in 2013.
Its stated purpose was to improve access to research on agriculture, food and the environment by federating the content of institutional repositories that already existed but could not usefully be searched together. Rather than creating another archive, it built a layer above the archives - shared metadata, a common search interface, and services intended to support the peer review and dissemination process around that content.
The consortium brought together fourteen partner organisations across ten countries, with a further group of affiliated partners. The partners were largely agricultural research institutes, universities and national research infrastructure providers.
What it produced
The project’s output fell into three broad categories.
A federated search platform aggregating agricultural and aquaculture research from participating repositories. This was the visible product, and it was taken offline after the funding period ended.
A body of peer-reviewed research on metadata quality, schema matching between agricultural repositories, and the behaviour of researchers using open-access infrastructure. This output entered the normal scholarly record and remains available through the usual channels.
A set of project deliverables - technical reports produced for the funder, including work on repository interoperability and a final set of recommendations for improving virtual repositories and scholarly online communities. The deliverables page records what these were.
What became of it
The platform is gone. The research is not, and neither are the repositories it federated - Organic Eprints, the agricultural repositories of the partner universities, and the wider network that FAO’s AIMS programme continues to support are all still operating.
This is a common pattern in project-funded research infrastructure, and it is the reason the durable contributions of such projects are usually the standards and the published findings rather than the software. The interoperability work outlasted the portal that demonstrated it.
Why this page exists
Old citations, bibliographies and library guides still point at this domain. Rather than let those references resolve to something unrelated, or vanish into a redirect, this page states plainly what was here, what happened to it, and what this site is now.
For the subject the project worked on, open access in agricultural research covers where that material lives today and how to search it.
Frequently asked questions
Is this website a continuation of the VOA3R project?
No. The project concluded in 2013 and its consortium dissolved. This domain was registered by a different owner years later and now hosts an independent editorial portal on agriculture and aquaculture technology. Nothing here is produced, endorsed or reviewed by the former consortium, its partner institutions or the European Commission.
Where can I find the project's publications now?
The peer-reviewed output is in the normal scholarly record and findable through AGRIS, Google Scholar and the institutional repositories of the partner universities. Project deliverables that were once hosted on this domain are archived in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which holds captures of the original site.
Is the VOA3R search platform still running?
No. The federated search portal the project built was taken offline after the funding period ended, which is the ordinary fate of project-funded infrastructure without a sustainability plan. The repositories it aggregated are all still running independently.