This article describes the development of the VOA3R Metadata Application Profile to facilitate the description, dissemination and reuse of research results in the fields of Agriculture and Aquaculture within a federation of open access repositories. VOA3R is a research project aspiring to deploy an advanced, community-focused integrated platform for the retrieval of relevant open content and data that supports explicit models of the scholarly lifecycle and the practical tasks targeted by applied research. The article details the phased implementation of the core VOA3R application profile relating to the description of scholarly resources. The development process has been based upon the methodology and components of the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles: functional requirements, domain model, description set profile, usage guidelines and data format. Maximum interoperability, reuse of existing mature metadata standards, long-term quality control and extensibility for addressing further community needs, constitute the main benefits of this approach.