Aquatic Commons has been merged with OceanDocs to form '
AquaDocs'' in July 2021.
Aquatic Commons is a thematic
digital repository covering the natural marine, estuarine, brackish and freshwater environments. Along with
OceanDocs, which mainly covers high sea environments, Aquatic Commons is one of the two major repositories related to fisheries, aquatic life and water environments. Both of them include all aspects of management and conservation of their respective environments, their life and resources and also the economic, sociological and legal aspects related to those environments.
The repository was started in 2007 and currently offers more than 5200 full-text documents on an Open Access basis. Its total number of downloads at the end of September 2011
[All statistics data are retrievable at the following webpage: http://aquaticcommons.org/cgi/irstats.cgi ] was more than 364.000. At present (March 2012), Aquatic Commons ranks 409 in the World Ranking of more than 1200 repositorie
its strong points being the number of rich text files and the number of papers and citations in its domain, whereas its drawback seems to be, up to now, the visibility of its material
Aquatic Commons is run on a non-profit basis by the
. As a co-funder, the
Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts
Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts is an abstracting and indexing service covering aquatic science and its subfields. It is maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It replaced the previous Current B ...
(ASFA) Trust Fund basically provides support to those institutions in developing countries, for which the digitizing of the material could be beyond their possibilities. It generally does so within a project framework, which also includes the "repatriation" of the digitized materials, and the retention of their copyright by the respective original institutions in
developing countries
A developing country is a sovereign state with a lesser developed Industrial sector, industrial base and a lower Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries. However, this definition is not universally agreed upon. There is al ...
.
The benefits of an
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...
digital repository like Aquatic Commons for their participating institutions and end-users are well-known and include the following most important ones:
# A secure site against the hazards of computer crashes, file corruption and virus attacks in relation to the conservation of digital copies of documents;
# A robust technical platform able to guarantee long-term availability;
# The commitment to preserve relevant documents and information on a specific topic for both published and
grey literature
Grey literature (or gray literature) is materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports ( annual, re ...
of prestigious institutions, which otherwise could not be available online on an open access basis.
The list of the currently participating institutions and universities worldwide is here
Notes
References
* Collins, J. ''Information sharing via the Aquatic Commons'' in: ''FAO Aquaculture Newsletter'', 37: 12-13, 2007
tp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a1246e/a1246e04.pdf{Dead link, date=October 2019 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes
* Garnica Carreño, J.L.; Gribling, A.; Wibley, H. ''Visibility and access through the Aquatic Commons'' in: ''FAO Aquaculture Newsletter'', 44: 4-6, 201
* ''The Aquatic Commons: a new digital repository for international aquatic information'' in: ''IFLA Express'', 7: 4, 200
External links
Aquatic CommonsIAMSLICAquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts websiteOceanDocsAquaDocs
Digital libraries
Fisheries databases
Biological databases
International organisations based in Italy