It became known that ProQuest may suspend the provision of free access to all signed institutions of the Russian Federation within the next month. The connection of new ASFA Associate Members in the Russian Federation has not yet been carried out, however, it has become possible to obtain the necessary information through other sources.
As an alternative to obtaining information from ProQuest, from 2022 the FAO website can be used, which contains all the information indexed by the Open-ASFA software: https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/openasfa
To date, since the installation and commissioning of the Open-ASFA software, the partners of the Russian ASFA Network have indexed more than 400 journal articles, books and atlases published during 2017-2022 in both Russian and English.
It should be noted that some ASFA Associate Members (MSTU, Murmansk; KGMTU, Kerch), who were granted access to the ASFA database for a period of two years in order to search and find information, decided to sign a Cooperation Agreement with VNIRO, which involves regular indexing of university publications.
VNIRO provides monthly individual trainings for training specialists of Collaborating Centers both for the purpose of indexing materials in the Open-ASFA software, and for effective search of necessary information within the database.
In addition, VNIRO employees are constantly working with the multilingual controlled dictionary AGROVOC (https://agrovoc.fao.org/browse/agrovoc/en /): new translated terms, definitions and concepts are being added, which greatly simplifies the work of Russian-speaking users with keywords, geographical descriptors and taxonomic terms in the process of preparing abstracts in Open-ASFA.
VNIRO Press Service