Integration activities

The European seafood research is today taken care of by a variety of different institutes and laboratories ranging from university departments, branches of governmental affiliated institutes dealing with research and control tasks, to semi-private and industry based laboratories. Some of these have regular contacts and the researchers meet for exchanging information of research projects at the annual plenary meetings of the  West European Fish Technologists' Association (WEFTA).

The SEAFOODplus integrated research programme has embraced the best activities of the institutes traditionally working within seafood research, and in addition integrated laboratories from environments not traditionally working with seafood, but utilising research disciplines that will benefit the development of seafood research, thus improving excellence within the European Seafood Research Area.

As the programme includes research conducted in groups being familiar with commodity orientated seafood as well as groups having a discipline orientated research aim, special attention is needed to integrate both researcher environments. The instruments for doing so includes training, exchange of personnel, PhD projects, joint studies, common work-ins, establishment of shared databases, and operation of shared websites. A website for information and as a discussion platform has already been realised. As the consortium will include research groups from all European regions, the use of Internet communication will be particularly valuable. In addition, special efforts will be made to integrate research groups from countries in East Europe.

In addition to training activities for researchers, a program is also being prepared for the training of key personnel in industry, particularly SMEs, thus integrating the research and industry environments, and assuring that any outcome from the SEAFOODplus R&D activities will be absorbed by the industry. Results will further be communicated in the specially developed dissemination programme of SEAFOODplus, and for further development of results for industrial exploitation, a special demonstration programme has also been established.