National Workshop on Access to Scientific Information Resources in Agriculture (ASIRA) Workshop was held in Ha noi, Viet Nam

The National Workshop on Access to Scientific Information Resources in Agriculture (ASIRA) was held in Ha Noi, Viet Nam on 14 November. The workshop presented programmes and topics aiming to contribute to the accessibility and dissemination of research outputs and data related to the five priorities of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to achieve a world without hunger, malnutrition and poverty and to do so in a sustainable manner, with a focus on exchange of knowledge, information and research data as a critical step in achieving the SDGs.

The workshop was attended by more than 100 people including researchers, librarians and students.

A wide variety of topics were part of the workshop including an overview of scholarly communication including publishing landscape, open access, open data and open science; information literacy skills including identifying and evaluating information resources, and search strategy building; registering Research4Life and using AGORA; using AGRIS and contributing to the database as data provider; research assessment and citation analysis in Dimensions; and using reference management tools to share and collaborate with peers. Participants of the workshop will continue to communicate and exchange knowledge via mailing list. 

Several participants shared their thoughts about the knowledge they gained during the workshop: 

“Workshop bring to me an online tool (Research4life) to search document and publish results aiming to help me in research.”

“Dimensions and AGORA are very impressive, the reference management tools are really useful as well.”

“It's great and useful, thank you!”

 

The Workshop was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with the Viet Nam National University of Agriculture (VNUA). The goal was to raise awareness on  scholarly communication including scientific publishing open data, open access and open science, and to improve technical capacity to access online research data in agriculture, fisheries and forestry.

FAO is eager to strengthen its work in Viet Nam in collaboration with FAO Viet Nam and VNUA. With this in mind, FAO and the Vietnam National University of Agriculture are thrilled to continue their partnership by organizing a regional AGRIS Workshop in 2020, which will focus on strengthening the accessibility and visibility of agricultural data through the use of semantics. The event will include stakeholders from Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. More information about the workshop will be shared in the AIMS December Newsletter and on the AIMS website.