VOA3R Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: sharing scientific and scholarly research related to agriculture, food, and environment Oostende, September 27 2011 Marc Goovaerts , Director Library Hasselt University marc.goovaerts@uhasselt.be

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

1. VOA3R – An introduction

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

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.

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..

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.

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

2. Background

Open Access - 1 Options to collect in VOA3R: Open Access journals Peer reviewed (see http://www.doaj.org/) 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

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

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

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

Examples of networking - 1 Linkedln - Professional networking http://www.linkedin.com

Examples of networking - 2 CiteULike – Zotero Social bookmarking Bibliographic tools for individuals – groups http://www.citeulike.org/ - http://www.zotero.org

Examples of networking - 3 Mendeley Bibliographic tools for individuals – groups http://www.mendeley.com

Examples of networking - 4 MyExperiment – share research objects http://www.myexperiment.org

3. Stakeholders

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!

→ 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

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

4. The VOA3R platform

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

The VOA3R platform – Home page http://voa3r.cc.uah.es/

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

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

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

VOA3R – Search and Browse 4 Added value

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)

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

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

Key features - Social Portal Research oriented elements

Portal: System architecture

Main use cases of the VOA3R portal

5. Alternative quality control and peer review

Reviewing Lifecycle Services  VOA3R "Controlled Experiment for Reviewing Lifecycle Services" You are kindly invited to participate in the next VOA3R Controlled Experiment: Please visit http://voa3r-mtsr11.blogspot.com, 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!