Inderscience and JournalTOCs agree to develop a Joint Industry Project (JIP)

Inderscience Publishers, a SMT publisher of over 340 peer-reviewed international journals have awarded funding to the Institute for Computer Based Learning (ICBL) at Heriot Watt University for an initial period of five months to create a prototype of a new XML-first workflow technology to produce scholarly output in a variety of digital market channel ready forms, in particular current-awareness oriented reusable formats. The project will use the new prototype to demonstrate a smart personalised current-awareness web interface and to trial a suitable open licence policy for the RSS feeds produced by scholarly publishers.

Joint Industry Projects (JIP) offer a route for JournalTOCs to carry out expensive research and development of proof of concepts and prototypes by spreading the risk and costs over ICBL and its industrial partners. A JIP also provides the JournalTOCs Team with the opportunity of working within a real industrial environmental.

This new JIP, codenamed X-PARC, will continue a synergistic partnership initiated in 2003 with scholarly publishers when ICBL was awarded funding from the JISC PALS Metadata and Interoperability Programme (phase 1). The partnerships have contributed significantly to the development of research projects and the creation of services at ICBL.

ICBL and Inderscience Publishers have worked together in the past in the following projects:

Those projects have provided ICBL with first-hand insight of scholarly publishing experience and their challenges within the current digital environment. They also have enabled us to study and develop innovative solutions for the demands of academics and researchers for intuitive and efficient information discovery systems to access content published by scholarly publishers.

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Development, Dissemination Comments 1 Mar 10th, 2012

Set up alerts for when pre-pub articles became officially published

Sometimes you may want to be made aware of articles that you know they have been submitted for a journal for peer-review. For example if you are an author you would want to be automatically notified when your article is published on the web. If you are the manager of an Institutional Repository (IR) you may want to run some kind of automated queries from your repository to the publisher’s database, for records without final publication details so that you can pick up the missing metadata as soon as the articles are officially published.

The JournalTOCs API can help you in these cases. It is not the perfect solution because there are publishers that are still not using DC and PRISM modules in their RSS feeds to enable aggregators to unambiguously identify authors and institutions. However, JournalTOCs still can help you to reduce the number of articles you may be missing to update in your IR.

A small webapp to run queries against the TOCs of journals that have been updated in the last 24 hours

Simon Greenhill, a research fellow in the Psychology Department and Computational Evolution Group at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has recently released a python wrapper for the JournalTOCs API to retrieve journal TOC RSS feeds by ISSN and then run local queries against the journals that have been updated in the previous 24 hours.

Simon uses the wrapper to load in a collection of articles using JournalTOCs various RSS feeds from a sizable list of journals. His application would require polling each journal RSS feed via the JournalTOCs API periodically. In order to make the calls to the API more efficient and less bandwidth-demanding, he uses the JournalTOCs API call latest_updates so he can call that single feed once a day or so, and see if any of the journals he cares about have been updated.

Wrapper Code: https://bitbucket.org/simongreenhill/journaltocsapi

JournalTOC API (RSS feed) to retrieve the journals that have been updated in the last 24 hours: http://api.journaltocs.ac.uk/journals/latest_updates


Using JournalTOCs API to be alerted when pre-pub articles became officially published

Let’s suppose you have a pre-pub article deposited in the IR of the University of Warwick by academic Ian Philp. To setup an alert to be informed when journalTOCs identifies that an article of Ian Philp has been published officially, you could complete these steps:

  1. sign in to JournalTOCs
  2. search for: Philp “University of Warwick” (Philp is a simple keyword and “University of Warwick” is the the name of the university enclosed by double quotes to signify phrase searching)
  3. You will get the search hits.
  4. From your Account Menu (top drop down list of options at the top corner under your account name) select & click on “Saved Searches“; or just point your browser to http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/savedSearches.php
  5. Under “You have recently searched for:” find your search query: Philp “University of Warwick” and click on its [Save] link
  6. Your search query will move up to your list of Saved Searches, from where you can choose to be alerted by email (click on “Alert-me“) or you can click on its RSS icon to create the RSS feeds for this search, so you can get the result via your RSS reader when the article is published.

By using the RSS feeds for your saved searches it might be possible to build some sort of application/plug-in that would automatically query JournalTOCs database from “in print” records in a repository to notify the IR manager when they were published. Just remember that the metadata in JournaTOCs is not good enough to identify articles by author uniquely because JournalTOCS only has what the publishers put into their RSS feeds. For example it might not work in practice with names like Smith and with universities like Birmingham (UK or Alabama?)

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Applications, Development, User Support Comments 3 Feb 28th, 2012

Transferring your journals (MyTOCs) from ticTOCs to JournalTOCs

As you may be aware, the ticTOCs service will be discontinued at the end of March 2012. The teams of ticTOCs and JournalTOCs are working together to facilitate a seemly and conveniently transfer of ticTOCs users’ accounts and the content of their MyTOCS folders to JournalTOCs, so ticTOCs users can opt-in to continue enjoying the benefits of a TOC current awareness service without interruption.

In particular, the end of ticTOCs will affect the users who have signed up to have MyTOCs folders with ticTOcs. With the aim of helping those users, JournalTOCs has setup a web page from where ticTOCs users can transfer their accounts to JournalTOCs before the end of March. By completing the following simple steps, ticTOCs users can quickly and easily transfer their accounts and their MyTOCs folder to JournalTOCs:

  1. Login at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk
  2. You will see all your journals listed in the MyTOCs section
  3. Click Select All button
  4. Click Export Selected button
  5. Save the tictocs.opml file
  6. Go to http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/tictocs_users/
  7. Enter your email address
  8. Upload your tictocs.opml file

Once you have completed the above eight steps, JournalTOCs will recreate your ticTOCs account on the JournalTOCs website and automatically will upload all your TicTOCs journals to your “Followed Journals”. You will receive a welcome email confirming your registration and giving you useful information to make the most of JournalTOCs.

If some of your journals are not found in the JournalTOCs database, the JournalTOCs crawler will index the missing journals and automatically add them to your JournalTOCs account in the few days after your have registered with JournalTOCs.

Please contact journaltocs@icbl.hw.ac.uk if you have any query regarding the above procedure. Further information and guidance for ticTOCs users can be obtained by contacting ticTOCs@mimas.ac.uk.

Happy Transfer!

Transfer from ticTOCs to JournalTOCs

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User Support Comments 0 Feb 20th, 2012

“Get latest articles from journals via the library”

The following translation is from the blog post “Få seneste artikler fra tidsskrifter” by Kasper Løvschall from Aalborg Universitet, Denmark, published yesterday.

One of the major challenges you, as a researcher or student, face is to stay up to date with the latest and most cutting edge information within your research or focus area. Having said “latest” and “most cutting edge” you’ve also said journals! For this is where major parts of science is typically published

Arif Jinha of the University of Ottawa have “conservatively” estimate that between 1665 and 2009 there have been published around 50 million articles worldwide in the many thousands of journals that exist or have existed. And it all started when the French scientific journal “Journal des Sçavans” and the English “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society” began with a systematic publication of research back in 1665…

And the numbers grows daily. PubMed, an index of life sciences publishing, maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine now enters an average of one article into their database every minute.

In the library’s search engine Primo [at Aalborg Universitet], we have references to around 60,000 journals and in our aggregated article index Primo Central around a few hundred million resources (including articles). So how can you stay up to date in this chaos of knowledge?

In several of our databases predefined searches can be set up as search agents that can keep you updated with everything new that comes into the system. Most publishers and aggregators (eg. ProQuest and EBSCO) offers some form of current awareness service in where you can subscribe to emails alerts or RSS feeds of the latest articles from a specific journal. The idea is really good but it can be a bit of challenge to find the journals across different provider’s websites and platforms. At some sites you can freely download the data while at others you must register and create profiles.

JournalTOCs makes it easy, we make it easier!

Here comes JournalTOCs to the rescue and it’s quite brilliant if you have a number of favourite journals you want to stay up to date with. JournalTOCs makes the hassle much easier for you by gathering all the journals RSS feeds from publishers together at one site where you easily can find the latest articles for a journal and create search agents. And best of all: JournalTOCs is totally free to use! As of today they have over 17,482 journals from over 957 publishers which cover a large part of the core journals used.

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JournalTOCs also provides an API for everyone to use and at the library we immediately started to experiment with it. It resulted in an integration of JournalTOCs directly into our library catalogue Primo. Every journal has a tab “Recent articles“. The tab displays an “interpreted” picture of the content from JournalTOCs. We try to add SFX links to each article (which you can read about in yesterdays “Christmas-tip”) so we are better able to guide you to the correct provider as well as a remote access possibility if you are not within the campus network. Finally, you can share articles or tables of contents via various social platforms and add a subscription to your favourite RSS reader – e.g. Google Reader.

So by using JournalTOCs, Primo and our own “Recent articles” functionality (and also through our direct integration into SFX) you are a step further in keeping your knowledge sharp and up to date without too much of a hassle.

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Applications, Dissemination Comments 0 Dec 21st, 2011

Most Followed Open Access Journals

This ranking presents the Open Access (OA) journals that have attracted the largest number of followers among JournalTOCs community of users in 2011. Only the top 30 most followed OA journals are included and compared in this list. An OA journal is a scholarly journal that does not charge readers for reading and using the full-text of its articles.

 NF   Title Publisher FPP     SSS JIF
156 D-Lib Magazine CNRI Free CS   –
  84 J. of Information Literacy Loughborough U. Library Free OJS   –
  66 J. of Digital Information Texas AM U. Libraries Free OJS   –
  63 J of Library and Info. Science Nat. Taiwan Normal U. Free OJS   –
  63 J. of Library Innovation WNYLRC Free OJS   –
  58 College and Research Libraries ALA Free CS   –
  51 Communications in Info. Literacy CIL free OJS   –
  50 Library and Info. Research CILIP N/A N/A   –
  50 Future Internet MDPI $570 CS   –
  50 Ariadne Magazine UKOLN free N/A   –
  48 Annals of Library & Info. Studies NISCAIR free DSpace   –
  45 Evidence Based Library and Info. Practice U. of Alberta Learning Services free OJS   –
  38 Code4Lib Journal Code4lib free Email   –
  36 PLoS ONE PLoS $1350 EMS   4.41
  36 Int. J. of Legal Information Int. Assoc. of Law Libraries free Email   –
  35 PLoS Biology PLoS $2900 EMS 12.47
  32 BMC Cell Biology Biomed Central Ltd. $1845 CS   2.46
  32 Information MDPI $260 CS   –
  30 New Knowledge Environments University of Victoria Free OJS   –
  27 BMC Public Health Biomed Central Ltd. $1845 CS   2.36
  26 Advances in Environmental Sciences Bioflux Society $200 CS   –
  26 J. of Electronic Publishing, The MPublishing Free Email   –
  26 Int. J. of Digital Curation UKOLN Free OJS   –
  24 BMC Bioinformatics Biomed Central Ltd. $1845 CS   3.03
  24 Info. Technologies & Int. Development Georgia Inst. of Technology Free OJS   –
  22 Obstetrics and Gynecology Int. Hindawi Publishing Corp. $1000 CS   –
  21 Computational Linguistics MIT Press Free OJS   2.97
  21 First Monday U. of Illinois at Chicago U. Free OJS   –
  17 J. of Communications Academy Publisher $470 EDAS   –
  15 JIPITEC Digital Peer Publishing Free Email   –
   CC BY 2.0 JournalTOCs Dec.2011 

NF: Number of followers
FPP: Fee paid by the author to publish a paper
SSS: Submissions System software
JIF: Journal Impact Factor (as reported by the publisher for 2010)
CS: Commercial or proprietary online system
OJS: Open Journal System
EMS: Editorial Manager from Aries System
EDAS: Commercial conference submissions system
U: University

Questions:

  • Do University-based OA journals have a good chance to be regarded as first-class and reliable journals?
    The answer could be “yes” if we consider that 30% of these top 30 OA journals are University-based.
     
  • Does it matter for this rank who is the publisher?
    All but one of these top 30 OA journals are published by established national corporations, professional associations, prestigious non-profit publishers or universities. Only a few of the OA journals published by commercial publishers have so far attracted the interest of JournalTOCs users. So, it seems that it does matter who the publisher is.
     
  • Is OJS really the “submissions system of OA journals”?
    Well, 35% of these journals use the Open Source submissions system OJS.
     
  • Are the OA journals with no fee for the authors attracting the largest number of citations?
    Probably we cannot get a clear answer to this question from the above ranking. What we can see is that PLoS Biology is the OA journal with the highest fee for authors ($2900.00 USD) but also with the highest known citation factor (JIF=12.47)
     
  • Are publishers of OA journals aware of the significance of JIF?
    Some publishers of OA journals were not aware of JIF or didn’t consider it to be important for their publications. In fact the publishers of most of the OA journals included in this list weren’t concerned about JIFs. An editor told us “JIF is not relevant [for our journal] as it is not a WoS journal. It is an OA journal already indexed in the DOAJ.”
     
  • Why is it that 19 out of these top 30 OA journals are from the Library and Information Sciences discipline?
    40% of registered users of JournalTOCs are librarians or professionals working in libraries of universities or research centres. This may explain the large number of library and information related journals in this ranking. The ranking doesn’t include the journals being followed by non-registered users.
     

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Applications Comments 0 Dec 19th, 2011

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