This poster presents the processes and paths of the authors who have recently prepared a report on descriptive metadata encoding recommendations for an European project, VOA3R (Virtual Open Access in Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository), which aims to deploy a virtual entry-point for exchanging and augmenting open bibliographic data, and thus improve the dissemination of research results in agriculture and aquaculture via open access. Specifically, our task was to prepare a report with a suggested title of "Recommendations for the Content Population of the VOA3R Service Provider". Since the VOA3R Federation consists of 17 institutions from 13 countries contributing proximately two million bibliographic records to eight open repositories, the immediate need was for the analysis of the number and characteristics of the open access documents that will be accessible from VOA3R. Following this task, the next step was to propose encoding recommendations for the exchange of metadata between data providers and the VOA3R platform. Along with the wave of the Linked Open Data (LOD) movement, the VOA3R project required that the recommendations should also be suitable for encoding with consideration to Linked Open Data.