Increasing the availability of West African Grey Literature to improve marine fisheries research and management
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
So as Sylvia said, the title of my presentation is increasing the availability of West African grey literature to improve marine fisheries management in the region. So my name is Tamsin Vickery, I work for the ASFA Secretariat which is based at FAO in Rome. I'm presenting this presentation which was put together with my colleague Maria Kalensis and also with help from
00:27
Darryl Superio of SEAFTEC Philippines and Oram Quita of Durek Shondapesh Maritam in Dakar, Senegal. So a quick agenda, I'll give an overview of ASFA's support to the Seacaf Pescau project in which we
00:42
are producing an inventory of marine fisheries research in the region. I'll give a brief overview of the search methodology that we used, a timeline of our activities, the preliminary results and conclusions before I go to the next steps. So at the time I was planning this presentation I hoped the project would be further on and as everyone can appreciate, 2020 has had
01:07
quite a few surprises for everybody. So it's just the preliminary results and conclusions I'll be presenting today. So starting off with an introduction to Seacaf, Pescau and ASFA. Seacaf
01:20
is the fishery committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic. It promotes the sustainable utilization of the living marine resources within its area of competence by the proper management and development of fisheries and fishing operations. Seacaf Pescau is a project which focuses on improving the regional governance of marine resources in the Seacaf area. It's an EU funded
01:44
project and it runs from December 2018 to December 2021. As I said I work for the ASFA Secretariat and ASFA is a 50 year old partnership dedicated to promoting aquatic sciences, fisheries and aquaculture research. We have a network of over 100 partners around the world
02:04
and we also have nine ASFA partners in the Seacaf region who have been recruited to work on this project. So this map here shows where our ASFA partners are located who are working on this project. We've recruited a library and professional from each of the institutions you can see
02:24
on this list here and they've been recruited to work and provide help to compile this research inventory. So those countries are Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and Spain. So what specifically is ASFA's role in the Seacaf Pescau project?
02:48
ASFA is contributing to output 1.2 which is collaboration on data and information sharing procedures and research enhanced between relevant countries, sub-regional and regional organizations to harmonize data and knowledge. So how are we achieving this? The output will be the
03:06
development of a comprehensive research inventory of marine fisheries research across Seacaf's area of confidence. So in order to build this research inventory we developed a search criteria
03:22
and a search methodology. The main thing to note of the search criteria is that we're looking for research by offers affiliated to one of the countries in the Seacaf region. So doing it that way allows us to assess the research strengths and gaps of each of those countries which will
03:43
enable us to better plan future research as well as gaining access to the research being conducted at present. It will increase access to overlooked grey literature from the region and it's helping already to foster new relations and information sharing networks in the region.
04:04
So you can see the document types that we're looking for as part of this inventory. It's a wide range of document types and they include both grey and primary literature that we're looking at and the subject topics we're looking for are also listed. So all of these are marine fisheries related so fishery biology, fisheries management, climate change, how it relates
04:26
to fisheries and marine protected areas. So here's a quick timeline of activities. As I said activities were slightly delayed. We had planned to do a in-person meeting in September but this
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of all activities were then moved online and we're delivering them now in the month of November. So we split compiling the inventory into two stages. The first stage is compiling online resources. So once a search methodology was agreed we searched Web of Science, Scopus,
05:07
Asfer and Google Scholar for relevant references. So that was the start of compiling the inventory and once we identified a relevant reference it was added to the inventory to form an inventory of all the online resources that were easily available.
05:26
Now stage two looks at those harder to reach research and in order for us to do this we recruited the nine Asfer partners you saw earlier who are compiling research available in their country that was not identified in stage one. So they're looking at their library holdings,
05:45
institutional research output that's not been added to one of the databases I mentioned. So their results, they're halfway through that work and the results are being added to the research inventory to form an overall comprehensive picture of research in the area.
06:06
So stage three will be in December where we'll perform a bibliometric analysis to identify the research capacity strengths and gaps of the region and we're really excited to do a comparison of what we find in stage one and what we find in stage two. So how much research
06:22
are we missing from the region? If we only search these online sources what research are we not finding? And the inventory will be made available online and we'll be creating bibliographic records to put onto open Asfer. So on to the preliminary results from stage one.
06:43
These are compiled by Darryl Superior who has been responsible for the stage one online sources. So researchers from Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Mauritania and Benin, Ghana they were less likely to publish their results whereas researchers from Spain, Nigeria, Morocco and Senegal were more active
07:03
in publishing. Darryl found that researchers in West African countries tend to collaborate more with researchers from outside the region. So I think that's quite interesting and it shows the importance of creating networks to foster collaboration in the region. Of those collaborators
07:21
outside the region, France and Canada were the top collaborators. Researchgate and dotplayer.net were important file sharing websites to aid the discoverability of grade literature. So I think that shows there's a need for online databases such as Asfer, the partnership I work for, to kind of step up and make sure that there are wider repositories
07:45
where research can be deposited. And a matter of concern, a considerable number of research outputs were published in predatory journals. So these are journals that kind of target authors. You pay to publish and there's no kind of peer review or rigorous kind of control over the work. So onto
08:07
the preliminary results from stage two, as I said we're halfway through roughly this work. So all these results are based on what we found so far. But through looking at the research
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participants have identified at their institutions and in their countries, we found that working papers, conference proceedings and annual reports are most likely document types to be overlooked as sources of research. We found that local knowledge is key. So we had a strategy we were hoping everybody would follow
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to identify research but they were the experts in their country, they knew how research was published and who to contact, so they followed their own strategy as a way to identify and get the most references possible. So authors and librarians are gateways to grey literature.
09:03
Contacting authors and librarians is a massively important way to discover grey literature. It's through identifying the correct people and being able to access the right resources that we've uncovered so much literature. And there was significantly more male than female
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authors and so we're only halfway through the work and things might change when we discover more. So preliminary conclusions. We really feel that work is needed to promote marine fisheries grey literature in the region. So grey literature produced in the region deserves a wider platform
09:40
to increase its reach. We're only two weeks into stage two of looking at institutional holdings and we're uncovering so much research that will benefit projects in the region. So support is needed to counter publication bias and the reliance on predatory journals.
10:02
So publishing fees and other barriers need to be overcome to help authors publish reputable journals where that is the case and they want to make their research published. Training and access to technologies was required, so depositing records on databases indexed by Google Scholar will definitely help it to increase the reach of this grey literature.
10:25
So lastly I'll just mention some of the project outcomes. So as I said there'll be a bibliometric analysis and report which we'll make available comparing what we find in stage one with stage two and helping us to understand the research strengths of each country and
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plan future research. There'll be a rollout of training to non-ASFA partners in the CCAF region so at the moment we've only worked with those countries where an ASFA partner is present and we'd like to expand it to the full region and possibly expand it to other regions to produce global comparisons of available research. Lastly the inventory will be uploaded
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onto OpenASFA so we will be making bibliographic records for research identified by ASFA partners and this will be available on ASFA's free to search platform OpenASFA which will be available next year. So that was my 10 minute presentation. Thank you for listening, I will stop sharing.