Public access to results of federally-funded research is a new mandate. Public access to scholarly literature from U.S. investments is straightforward, with systems like PubAg (http://pubag.nal.usda.gov) already in place. However, research data release is a newer and more complex undertaking. Agricultural researchers currently make their data available in many different locations and metadata and data formats are far from standardized. Here we describe a pilot system (URL TBA) that will meet the requirements of public access but also aims to go further to facilitate novel, data-intensive science. The system leverages distributed, domain-specific and institutional repositories. At the same time, direct submission of metadata and data is now available to USDA-funded researchers. Core metadata fields are from Project Open Data v.1.1 (a requirement of the U.S. open data catalog at http://data.gov) but we added fields and features to support scholarly research. We issue DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), accept author ORCIDs (http://orcid.org/) and other author identifiers, apply National Agricultural Library thesaurus terms, and encourage citation of literature and linkage with related datasets and other online resources. Future plans include easier ways to harvest metadata from and serve metadata to distributed repositories, customized metadata templates for selected researcher communities, robust versioning and preservation functions. We are developing guidelines for machine-readable data dictionaries and beginning to work with related efforts towards interoperability. As we prepare for full production, it is important to continue our user-centered iterative development process and align with public access and agency data management policies as they develop. Finally, we must prepare for the outreach and training needs of our community of users.