Fishery Technology: The Peer-Reviewed Journal of SOFTI, Kochi
Fishery Technology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published from Kochi, Kerala, by the Society of Fisheries Technologists (India), known by its acronym SOFTI. It is the journal of record for Indian fisheries technology: the design of fishing craft and gear, the handling, processing and preservation of fish, aquaculture technology, and the economics and extension of the fisheries sector. Published quarterly in its modern form and distributed today through the ICAR's online journal platform as well as in print, it has carried the research of India's fisheries institutes for decades, with contributions archived and cited under its own DOI series.
The Society of Fisheries Technologists (India)
SOFTI is a non-profit scientific society established in 1962, bringing together members engaged in research, development, education and policy making related to fisheries. Its stated objective is to promote the cause of fisheries in general and fisheries technology in particular in all its aspects, and it acts as a forum connecting fishery technologists globally. The society organises national and international seminars, conferences and symposia periodically, and bestows awards for outstanding contributions to the advancement of fisheries and allied areas in India. Fishery Technology is its principal scholarly instrument — described by the society as an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the propagation of fishery technology and related areas — and copyright in the journal's articles rests with the society. SOFTI's office stands at CIFT Junction, Matsyapuri P.O., Cochin 682 029, in the same campus neighbourhood as the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology, with which the society's membership is closely intertwined.
Scope: From Trawl Meshes to Cell-Based Fish
The journal's contents map the whole technical chain of fisheries. Its earlier volumes carried papers on the advantages of large meshes in midwater trawls, specifications for combination wire rope for fishing purposes, the durability of timbers in underwater fisheries structures, and methods for separating squalene from fish liver oils. Processing science has always been a second pillar: studies of frozen stored fish mince, individually quick-frozen and block-frozen prawns, pickled fish quality, dry-cured fish protection, black discolouration in raw shrimps and bacterial contamination of mussels all appear in its back pages. Recent volumes show the scope extending rather than narrowing: the journal has published a review of cell-based fish meat production by scientists of ICAR-CIFT and its Visakhapatnam centre, an assessment of technology-induced productivity in artisanal fisheries at Cochin, a study of capacity utilisation in Kerala's fish processing plants, collaborative management of the Cochin estuary, and a broad extension perspective on Kerala's marine fisheries — harvest, post-harvest, biology, economics and society in one journal.
The journal's environmental and socio-economic strand deserves emphasis, because it separates Fishery Technology from a purely engineering journal. Its volumes have carried studies of the environmental status of the Gandhisagar reservoir, of copper, chromium and manganese in the water and sediment of the Kali estuary at Karwar, of the exploited fishery resources of Vembanad Lake based on its Pokkali fields and polders, of the decision-making behaviour of traditional fishermen in adopting improved technologies, and of the economics of fishing units in Kerala's backwaters. Fisheries technology, as the journal defines it in practice, includes the ecosystems fished, the communities fishing them and the markets they supply — a definition its contents have sustained across six decades.
Peer Review and the ICAR Platform
In its current form Fishery Technology is published on the ICAR's e-publications platform, where each article carries a DOI under the journal's prefix (in the form 10.56093/ft) and passes through a recorded submission, revision and acceptance process — published papers show their received and accepted dates, and review articles and research articles are distinguished as separate sections. The platform gives the journal the standard machinery of modern scholarly publishing: article-level pages, downloadable PDFs, citation information in the journal's name, and licensing held by SOFTI. The journal's volume sequence runs deep into the archive on the same platform — Volume 60 appeared in 2023 and Volume 61 in 2024, with older volumes such as Volume 37 and Volume 35 retrievable alongside them — so a researcher can move from a 1990s study of processing plant utilisation to a 2024 review of cultivated fish meat within one catalogue.
Kochi, CIFT and the Kerala Fisheries World
The journal's Kochi setting is not incidental. Kochi — Cochin — is home to ICAR's Central Institute of Fisheries Technology, the national institute for fishing and fish processing technology, and to a cluster of fisheries institutions around Matsyapuri. SOFTI was founded by the community of scientists who built that cluster, and the journal's authorship reflects it: CIFT scientists are among its most frequent contributors, and its pages have carried generations of work on Kerala's fisheries, from the Vembanad Lake and Pokkali field fisheries of its early volumes to recent analyses of the state's marine fisheries economy and its processing industry. At the same time the journal is national and international in authorship, publishing work from fisheries institutes and universities across India and abroad; Kochi is its home, not its boundary.
What the Journal Has Documented
Read as an archive, Fishery Technology records the technological transformation of Indian fisheries. Its early papers belong to an era of craft-and-gear improvement, fish curing and the first freezing plants; its middle volumes document the prawn export boom, quality control in peeling sheds, and the mechanisation and motorisation of the artisanal fleet; its recent volumes address sustainability, extension reform, value-added by-product utilisation — including a web-based information system for fish by-products developed at CIFT — and frontier topics such as cell-cultivated fish. Few Indian journals offer so continuous a technical record of a single sector, and historians of Indian fisheries science can trace through its volumes how the questions changed from catching more fish, to processing it safely, to sustaining the resource and the communities that depend on it.
Readership and Use
The journal is read by the professional community it serves: fisheries scientists, technologists in the seafood processing industry, teachers and students of fisheries science, and policy and extension workers. Its papers are working literature — gear specifications, processing parameters, storage studies — as much as academic currency, and its studies of adoption of improved technologies by traditional fishermen, of quality control in decentralised prawn peeling units and of the economics of backwater fishing units speak directly to development practice. Through the ICAR platform its articles are openly reachable, extending that readership beyond subscribing libraries to the wider Indian Ocean fisheries community the society aims to connect.
SOFTI Beyond the Journal
The journal sits within the society's broader activity. SOFTI's seminars and conferences — hosted with institutions such as CIFT — gather the same community that writes for Fishery Technology, its awards recognise contributions to Indian fisheries, and its Kochi secretariat maintains the society's correspondence and membership. This society-journal model, common in Indian science, gives Fishery Technology institutional continuity: it does not depend on a commercial publisher's list, and its editorial direction follows the discipline's own judgement of what fisheries technology needs to discuss next.
Place in Indian Fisheries Literature
India publishes fisheries research across institute journals, university publications and international titles, but Fishery Technology holds a particular position as the dedicated, society-owned journal of the fisheries technology discipline, published continuously from Kochi under SOFTI's ownership since the society's early decades. Its combination of gear and craft research, processing science, aquaculture and socio-economics, its presence on the national ICAR platform with full DOI registration, and its deep back archive make it a standard reference for anyone tracing how India's fisheries were modernised — and how the country's fishery technologists understood that process as it happened.
