The general objective of the VOA3R project is to improve the spread of European agriculture and aquaculture research results by using an innovative approach to sharing open access research products. That will be achieved by carrying out innovative experiments with open access to scientific agriculture and aquaculture contents and by developing and providing services that integrates existing open access repositories and scholarly publication management systems by means of a federation approach. The VOA3R platform aims at reusing existing and mature metadata and semantics technology to deploy an advanced community-focused integrated service for the retrieval of relevant open content and data that includes explicit models of the scholarly methods and procedures used and of the practical tasks targeted by applied research (which represent a principal information need expression for practitioners). The service will enable researchers to formulate their information needs in terms of elements of the scientific methods established in their field (variables, techniques, assessment methods, kinds of objects of interest, etc.) combined with topical descriptions as expressed in metadata. The community approach will enable the enhancement of information seeking with extended evaluation elements (as for example, ratings, public reviews, social tagging and links to supporting or conflicting reports) that complement and go beyond the traditional, anonymous peer review process which results are not made available openly.The technology used will itself become open source, so that the model of the service can be adopted by enterprises (including SMEs) or other kinds of institutions as a value-added, community-oriented model for open access content.