that embraces open science principles with coverage of grey literature at its heart. So this presentation will cover a number of impact studies we have undertaken and have been undertaken for us that demonstrate the reasons why we chose to focus on grey literature and moving towards a more open model. I'll discuss the technologies that we're going to

use to implement this model and finally what doing so enables ASFA to achieve in the future. So first of all an overview of the ASFA partnership. There are over a hundred institutions that contribute to the ASFA abstracting and indexing database. These are based in

over 50 countries around the world and each partner is responsible for monitoring the aquatic sciences, fisheries and aquaculture information in their country, creating a bibliographic record that goes on to the ASFA database. The ASFA database is published

by ProQuest, it's available freely to partners and to institutions in low-income food deficit countries at the moment and has over 3.7 million records. Partners contribute 15,000 records per year roughly, which is a combination of grey literature and primary literature

and the commercial publisher ProQuest contributes around 85%, so the largest chunk of the records and these are primary literature mainly as that is most easy for the commercial publisher to get the records from. So ASFA has always been known for its grey literature coverage. A recent

thesis by Diana Castillo at Dalhousie University surveyed a number of librarians, ASFA users and ASFA subscribers and summarised that they recognise the importance of ASFA for its international coverage, particularly of grey literature about fisheries and aquatic sciences.

However, what I've come to realise from my initial beginnings working at ASFA, first as a partner, now as the secretariat, is that coverage of an input to the database has not evolved, ASFA has not kept pace with new technologies, the monitoring and recording

of grey literature is haphazard and we have no way of quantifying what we're actually including on the database, so although we have a reputation for covering grey literature and I think ASFA began in 1971 when technologies with fewer publications made available, it did a very good job in its beginnings of covering grey literature but with

the influx of literature that open science has enabled, ASFA has not kept pace and can note it's hard to say without the monitoring and recording whether ASFA is truly covering grey literature in the sense that it did in a pre-digital age. Also as a commercial product,

this causes conflict between ASFA and FAO, so FAO has implemented open data, open access policies, the open access policies say that material FAO owns the copyright to must be made available,

FAO owns the copyright to the ASFA database, yet it's on a subscription only product, so we have the challenge of implementing a business model that is in line with FAO open policies. So the first thing we decided to do was look at what grey literature was actually covered on the ASFA database, these were our first steps this year trying to make an assessment,

so each ASFA partner completed an online standardised report where they were asked what grey literature they covered, so the results were that just over half monitor their own institutions grey literature, less than a third monitor other institutions grey literature in their own country or region where they are responsible and less than half monitor non-serial

publications, so around 40% of, sorry I think this is the wrong presentation, so our first step was not looking at all partners recovering, it was actually assessing user needs, so in December 2018 before we did the annual reports this year, we ran a user survey

which received 568 responses, as you can see from the graph on your left, project documents reports and conference proceedings was the third most needed activity by fisheries, aquaculture,

aquatic sciences information users, roughly 371 people responded they needed that for their daily activities, so roughly in line with how many needed data, obviously we expected academic research and scholarly to be the most needed information type, however ASFA with its international partnership grey literature is where it adds value, I don't think people

struggle to discover primary literature so adding grey literature from each partner where they have the knowledge of what's being published was really valuable, another interesting response we had was in the same survey we asked how users rated the below database features and this didn't tie up with what the first question, so grey literature actually was the least likely to

be ranked five which was very highly, we think that is more our conclusion I've put was that education on what grey literature is was needed rather than kind of rethinking ASFA's grey literature focus, I think if you're an information user you know that you need conference proceedings and technical reports but that's not the same as knowing that you need grey

literature, so having decided that grey literature where ASFA's beginnings were and its strength was what we wanted to continue providing, we then looked at ASFA partners' grey literature coverage and so partners were asked whether they cover grey literature for ASFA so I went through

the results, so less than half covered their own institutions' grey literature, as ASFA partners are supposedly responsible for the monitoring of literature in their own countries we really had hoped that would be higher, so we did look at what was actually being added to the ASFA database on ProQuest which is the graph on your right, although the percentage

of research by source type, so what source type, grey literature source types were being added to the ASFA database year by year, so although the percentage is increasing, the green level there was the number of grey literature records, so there's a slight increase but because the overall records are down we don't believe that grey literature has been covered

in a sufficient way in line with ASFA's reputation, so we decided that we needed to formulate a grey literature strategy, we presented a draft strategy and ideas for the recent ASFA advisory board meeting which took place in September, this began with an informal

quiz on whether partners considered several documents to be grey literature or not, so you have the results in this table here and you can see this consensus on things like dissertation or thesis, whereas something like the video which is an online course and technical guidance, there was more division on what people answered, so this was a good way of kicking off the

discussions and ensuring that partners who are supposedly responsible for grey literature coverage have a framework to decide what is useful to ASFA, what should be included, what do we mean by grey literature. As a result of this discussion we came up with the following definition based on the private definition but designed to be quite broad and just a framework rather than

a strict kind of this is grey literature or not, so ASFA partners came up with a definition that grey literature for ASFA is information presented in any number of physical or digital formats under the subject scope of aquatic sciences fisheries or aquaculture of sufficient

quality to be preserved and of public good, so this idea of public good is very important to us, we want to be recording information that will be used and useful in the aquatic sciences, fisheries, aquaculture sectors. Okay so having decided that we were going forward with grey

literature, ASFA technologies were the next step to look at, we were in need of updating if we were to really provide comprehensive coverage, so currently ASFA is using a CDSS ISIS software

which has been using since 1997 to create records, this is very problematic, it only allows, it produces the records in an ISO format which are then exported to the commercial publisher, so there is no way that the work that the partners do to create these records can be made openly available in any other system due to the kind of obsolete format and the closed nature

of the software that is used, so in order to be in line with FAO open access policies, we decided to move to a virtual research environment which will be provided by Defor Science and so there's a summary of what this gives us, so it will be a web-based system

tailored to the needs of ASFA, so we've worked really closely with Defor Science to ensure this new system will meet all of our needs and goals, it's open and flexible and provides a fine-grained controlled sharing of data which is really important and a big step for

ASFA as it moves towards an open business model, so there are three key kind of areas for us which the VRE allows us to do, which is connecting bibliographic information to other data products, harvesting from key OAI PMH compliant repositories and providing an open platform,

so a bit more detail about what the VRE virtual research environment provides us, so it's an open platform, for the first time ASFA partners records will be stored on a platform that is openly searchable in line with FAO open data and open access policies,

and being open will enable the participation in a wider range of projects, both in FAO and externals such as open air, and we hope that this open system will make ASFA attractive to a wider range of partners, so we've seen a drop-off from institutions in developed countries participating in ASFA because they don't want to contribute their time and their

effort just to a closed or subscription only product, so we hope that offering this open system enables a wider participation in ASFA, so the VRE will benefit from other open systems, we mapped the ASFA metadata fields to Dublin Core and to improve interoperability,

the agreement we have with default science will allow harvesting from 10 repositories, again avoiding duplication of efforts and a way to bring other institutions back into the partnership. We're going to use external taxonomic and geographic lists for indexing, and it allows the import export of metadata from partner repositories as another way to avoid

duplication of efforts. The next step is we'll be enhancing other open information systems, so we're already looking at collaborating with an aquatic genetic resources registry to monitor research on strains of species used for aquaculture in different countries,

so this is where ASFA's detailed metadata will become useful. We're going to use APIs to display the ASFA records on websites, so we've trialled this on the FAO website, linking fisheries and aquaculture bibliographic information with statistical products in country profiles, species lists etc to show what bibliographic information is also available

on these data products, and it's an open platform that other FAO projects can use, so we're looking at contributing to other FAO projects. As mentioned, we're looking at becoming an open-air provider by using the virtual research environment, so the VRE has an extension on the ASFA data entry catalogue,

which is part of the VRE, and this will enable records to be sent to Zenodo well that we made available on open air. Again, this is ensuring compliance with FAO and also EU open policies and standards, and a way of increasing reach and access to partners' great literature,

so the graph, the little display here shows that a record can be created either manually by a partner or harvested from a repository where it will go to the VRE. From there, the person responsible for the harvesting feed or creating the record can decide to export it to Zenodo, to the commercial database ProQuest, or it can set up an API service to link records

to their own website. At the recent meeting in September, we decided to initiate a pilot study involving data sets from ASFA partners in the UK and Uganda who highlighted their

data sets that were not on stable repositories and needed to find a home. Other than the VRE, the next technology we are updating is the ASFA subject vocabulary. ASFA, having worked in this closed system, maintained three controlled vocabularies,

the subject vocabulary, a taxonomic list, and a geographic authority file. From working in these closed systems, they all really suffered. They were not maintained frequently. They were updated maybe four or five years, which for a taxonomic list and a geographic list became very problematic with incorrect and obsolete kind of terms.

We decided not to continue with the taxonomic and geographic lists, but we were able to convert the subject vocabulary to a Scos Excel and migrate it onto the open source software, VOCbench, where we are sharing services with FAO's main vocabulary, Agrovoc.

This allows ASFA to have its own separate concept scheme, which is available as a linked open data set. Any partner anywhere across the world can contribute. It's multilingual. This is the first time where ASFA's information products have been encouraged to not be just in

English. As we have partners in 50 countries around the world, we're so excited to be able to allow them to contribute their own language. They'll be able to use their translations as a separate scheme and link to them. We're very excited about that.

Other than the technologies, we're also implementing a more open structure to the ASFA partnership. We've created a newsletter, and we will be running a conference every year. The in order to give partners a platform to share their ideas and collaborate, listening to partners

has been the biggest gain from the past two years, and their ideas of what's going to bring the ASFA partnership forward. Here we have free ideas from partners who presented at the conference in September, the problems they're facing, great literature storage in their own regions,

and possible solutions for ways for ASFA that can help. The other way, next steps for ASFA, is how using our improved grey literature can support open science. So ASFA will be participating in a file project PESCAO to make an inventory of primary and grey

literature in CFKAF countries, which are those in orange and green. So this inventory, ASFA partners are going to catalogue the information and their grey literature resources, store them on the VRE. So this is going to contribute to identifying research strengths

and weaknesses in these areas, and result in an identification of printed materials and subsequent digitisation projects, where we find analogue information that is not yet available. We'll also be providing training and skills across these regions to ensure people have the knowledge and skills to fully manage their information and make it accessible.

I mentioned previously the Aquatic Genetic Resources Registry. So ASFA records on the VRE are going to contribute to this registry using subjects geographic and taxonomic terms to identify which aquaculture species are being used in which areas, and the research being done on them. Another way that we're implementing this strategy is

ensuring that partners are able to perform and take responsibility, take control and ownership of work. So previously, everything was done by the ASFA secretariat in Rome. It was quite a closed decision-making process. So we've implemented five working groups to enable

collaborative ownership of ASFA technologies, products and policies. So each of these groups has its own terms of reference. They'll be working independently to ensure ASFA meets its goals of an open information system. We're implementing an ASFA associate screen from next year, so this increases participation. This will enable free access to the database in return

for potential collaboration between ASFA and the ASFA associate, such as them contributing records to the database or providing skills and expertise in other areas. There'll be a focus on developing countries, so ensuring they have access both to the database and to the knowledge,

sharing activities and training materials that ASFA provides. Improved reporting to measure progress, so we're not going to rest on our laurels and our reputation as a grey literature strategy. We're going to come up with the data to measure this and ensure the strategy is effective. And work will culminate in ASFA's 50th year anniversary, which is in 2021.

This, we hope to hold another conference from the one we had in September to update on the success or implementation of this strategy and how it has helped increase the accessibility of aquatic sciences, fisheries and aquaculture, grey literature from around the world.

Okay, that's been done I think in 20 minutes, so I've rushed through everything that we've done in the last two years to move ASFA from a closed access to something more open. This is a work in progress. We're still in this transition period, so already the ideas I've

heard from people are really useful to ASFA. If anybody has any questions or any general feedback on what we're trying to achieve, the usefulness of it, other ideas, I'd be really happy to hear that.