JournalTOCs Blog

Recently two of our licensed institutional users have been awarded with a project grant and a prestigious award respectively, both of them involving the use of JournalTOCs Premium.

1. Award to develop an automated e-TOCs current awareness service at the NYMC

The Health Sciences Library of the New York Medical College (NYMC), in partnership with the Health Sciences Library System of the University of Pittsburgh, has been awarded a grant to develop an automated Electronic Table of Contents Current Awareness Service using RSS Feeds. The project has been funded with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services of the United States, under Contract No. HHS-N-276-2011-00003-C.

Partial results of the project have been presented by Marie Ascher, the Associate Director of NYMC Library, in the 11th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML), Boston, USA. ICML is the premier event in Health Sciences Information sponsored this year by JAMA, Elsevier, EBSCO and Wolters Kluwer, among other publishers of medical literature. Marie presented the poster “Development of an Automated Electronic Table of Contents Current Awareness Service Using RSS Feeds and the Library Blog” on Tuesday 7th May during the ICML Poster Session 4.

The objective of the NYMC project is to develop a fully automated e-TOCs current awareness service to replace the physical daily journals shelf. As at many other libraries, researchers used to visit the library regularly to browse the daily journal receipts. However, since print journal collection has shrunk drastically in favour of electronic journals, NYMC recognized the need for a new way to view the latest journal content and embraced the metaphor of the Virtual New Journals Shelf to develop a fully automated e-TOCs system that would push content from JournalTOCs to a “New Journal TOCs” webpage or a posting on the library’s blog.

We congratulate the Health Sciences Library and their creative use of JournalTOCs Premium.

2. IFLA Award to the best library marketing project (5th place) to the VSSC

A Commendable Work award was given to the Indian Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) for the project “Inspiring Library Patrons“. VSSC bagged 5th position of the prestigious IFLA International Marketing Award for 2013. The winners will be announced officially at the IFLA press conference at Singapore in August 2013. Eileen Breen, Senior Publisher at Emerald, which was the sponsor of the award in this year, commented: This year’s winners of the IFLA International Marketing Awards illustrate perfectly Emerald’s endeavours to support global initiatives that benefit society. Once again the IFLA International Marketing Awards prove inspirational to the whole information community and we congratulate these worthy winners.

VSSC Library was awarded for conducting an “open book quiz” programme to make their research staff aware of their services and use the products subscribed by VSSC. About 900 users participated and 688 completed the quiz. The programme was a success, rated as the best program of 2012 in VSSC and all the users appreciated the work and it was well supported by VSSC management. The last question of the quiz was to list 3 favourite journals from a list of journals with customised links to JournalTOCs. N. Narayanan Kutty, the VSSC Periodicals Head, said “If they had asked the users directly to provide their favourite titles in the normal way, only very few would have sent their responses.”

We congratulate the VSSC Library for its effectiveness in making users aware of the library services.

Alerting OA accessibility using available bibliographic metadata standards

Forward thinking publishers have started to include in their Table of Contents (TOC) RSS feed metadata, elements that describe the copyright and access rights associated with an OA article. Being able to identify the accessibility of an article becomes even more important when the article has been published in a hybrid journal in which some articles are OA while the rest of the articles are available on an individual pay-per-view basis or journal subscription. The following is a sample of those publishers and the metadata elements that they are using to identify article’s copyrights and access rights:

• Inderscience Publishers
  For subscription articles:
  <dc:rights>© 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.</dc:rights>
  <cc:license></cc:license>

  For OA articles:
  <dc:rights>First Author [et al] (Open Access)</dc:rights>
  <cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”/>
  

• John Wiley and Sons
  For both OA and subscription articles:
  <dc:rights xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”/>
• Wolters Kluwer – Lippincott Williams and Wilkins
  For both OA and subscription articles:
  <copyright><![CDATA[(C)2010 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc.]]></copyright>

• Biomed Central Ltd.
  All articles are OA. For all articles:
  <cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/” />
• Hindawi Publishing Corporation
  All articles are OA. For all articles:
  <copyright>Copyright © 2013 First Author [et al.] All rights reserved.</copyright>
• Libertas Academica
  For subscription articles:
  <cc:license></cc:license>

  For OA articles:
  <cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”/>

• ISRN International Scholarly Research Network
  All articles are OA. For all articles:
  <copyright>Copyright © 2013 First Author [et al.] All rights reserved.</copyright>
• PeerJ
  All articles are OA. For all articles:
  <dc:rights>© 2013 First Author [et al.]</dc:rights>
  <terms:license>
      <terms:LicenseDocument rdf:about=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/”/>
  </terms:license>
  <prism:copyright>© 2013 First Author [et al.]</prism:copyright>
  <cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/”/>
  <cc:attributionURL rdf:resource=”[article URL]“/>
  <cc:attributionName> First Author [et al.]</cc:attributionName>

Some diversity can be seen in the implementation of the copyright and license elements. However, it is positive to notice that a pattern is emerging, where the dc:rights element is used to identify the copyrights holder for the article and cc:license to indicate the access rights for the article. JournalTOCs supports the use of dc:rights and cc:license that follow this pattern:

• For subscription articles:
  <dc:rights>© [Publication Year] [Publisher_Name]</dc:rights>
  <cc:license></cc:license>
• For OA articles:
  <dc:rights>First Author [et al] (Open Access)</dc:rights>
  <cc:license rdf:resource=”[Selected_CC_License]“/>

These elements should be included in the journal RSS feeds and in any metadata that publishers expose for aggregators and discovery services. A&I, aggregators and discovery services will be able to identify an item as an OA article by checking that its dc:rights element contains the text “Open Access” and/or the cc:license element is pointing to a specific CC license.

JournalTOCs supports the use of standard metadata to identify OA content in particular from hybrid journals in which OA and subscription articles are published together. In that sense we advise publishers to use the dc:rights and cc:license elements as describe above. Publishers are welcome to contact JournalTOCs at journaltocs@hw.ac.uk for further information and guidance in the implementation of these two elements for their RSS feeds.

 
JournalTOCs was created to solve the difficulty in keeping up with cutting edge research development.

JournalTOCs is the only free service in the world with the goal of immediately making researchers aware of new research that is relevant to them.

JournalTOCs is an initiative of the ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. It was created in 2009 with funding from the JISC Rapid Innovation Grants, and is now an independent non-profit service.

As we know there a range of variations in the quality of the RSS feeds that publishers produce to announce the latest issues or articles published in their journals. But we wonder if there is any correlation between quality of a journal and quality of its RSS feeds. In particular what about the best journals, I mean the journals with the highest impacts, most-cited articles and the most prolific content? Are their TOC RSS feeds a reflection of their outstanding position and quality?

Surely the publishers of the top journals are aware of the advantages of providing excellent RSS feeds (with rich content, tagged with standards elements and focused in enabling re-usability and early awareness.) We can get a good idea of the quality of the RSS feeds of those top journals by checking that their RSS feeds are valid and well formed, follow the RSS specifications for scholarly publishers, and in particular are making use of the main RSS 1.0 modules recommended by the “Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers“, namely the Dublin Core and PRISM modules. We are carrying out such analysis, which will take some time. In the meantime we could check the RSS feeds of the winners of the ALPSP Award for Best New Journal 2012, recently announced.

It is interesting to notice that Postmedieval, from Palgrave Macmillan, which is the winner of the ALPSP Award for Best New Journal 2012 is among the journals with the best TOC RSS feeds too.

The TOC RSS feeds of Postmedieval include all the metadata required to support efficient reuse (e.g. OpenURL resolution) and dissemination (e.g. current awareness) of latest articles, making Postmedieval a good example of how to use RSS feeds.

The TOC RSS feeds of Postmedieval implement very well the recommendations and guidelines made by the RSS Advisor Board as well as the Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers.

Similarly the winner of the Highly Commended Certificate (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, from the British
Ecological Society and Wiley-Blackwell) as well as the shortlisted journals (Cancer Discovery, from the
American Association for Cancer Research, and Physical Review X, from the American Physical Society) have excellent TOC RSS feeds.

Clearly there is a direct relationship between the quality of those new journals and the quality of their RSS feeds. In a next post we will report on the results of our analysis of the RSS feeds collected by JournalTOCs to determine whether the top journals tend to have the best TOC RSS feeds or not.

Postmedieval TOC RSS feeds:
http://feeds.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/rss/current?format=xml

Methods in Ecology and Evolution TOC RSS feeds:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/rss/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-210X

Cancer Discovery
http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/rss/current.xml

Physical Review X
http://feeds.aps.org/rss/recent/prx.xml

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:

• Implementation of Metadata and Interoperability standards for publishers (PALS Project)
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/…/pals1/oairepositry
• Creation of a subject-based cross-search service for resource discovery in engineering (TechXtra service)
  http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/
• Prototyping of a Journal Table of Contents Service (ticTOCs Project)
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/…/usersandinnovation/tictocs.aspx

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.