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.

Many would argue that there is no excuse for software developers not to support old browsers, aka browsers that have been released more than five years ago or do not support the advanced web apps commonly used in modern websites.

Some will point out that developers should apply standards that all browsers should support, and that the whole point of well formed HTML is that it should render in any browser.

But what about security vulnerabilities commonly found in older browsers and what about the support for the rich and interactive web apps that have transformed the way we interact with websites nowadays? Shouldn’t those two reasons be enough to convince anyone to upgrade their browser? Our experience with the NHS, the major UK Heath service, has shown us that sometimes the answer is no.

JournalTOCs is used by hundreds of professionals from the NHS. Sometimes we receive enquiries from NHS librarians, who are using JournalTOCs to support the current awareness demands of their patrons. A recurrent question, made by those librarians in a rather apologetic manner, is whether JournalTOCs web pages will work and render without problems by the browser being used by many in the NHS, which is the old version 7 of the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE7). Those librarians are pleased to learn that JournalTOCs has been developed to work with IE7 and also newer browser versions.

IE7 was released by Microsoft in October 2006. It was shipped as the default browser in Windows Vista systems and was offered as a replacement for IE 6 for Windows XP systems. IE7 was superseded by IE8 in March 2009, which in turn was replaced by IE9, released in March 2011. IE9 no longer supports Windows XP systems. IE7 is now a seven years old browser. However, it is estimated that IE7’s global market share is still 4%.

The issue becomes relevant in particular when you need to provide an external web service to NHS users. Probably a sizable chunk of the IE7 market share comes from the NHS and other departments from the UK government such as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The NHS alone has more than 800,000 workstations and laptops nationwide, where IE7 is installed by default.

Why is an organisation with the importance of the NHS letting its staff use a seven years browser that has already been superseded by two versions? And why IE only? The clue to the answer can be found by the fact that the NHS is one of those organisations that are more concerned with maintaining the stability of their major critical intranets than being compliant with external services and websites that are occasionally used by their staff. Google can be omnipresent and very important for millions of users and can afford to stop supporting old browsers (Modern browsers for modern applications) and develop its own browser, but it will not deter those organisations from continuing using a browser that is strongly interrelated with their enterprise intranets.

As long as critical NHS enterprise applications are still depending on IE7, JournalTOCs will continue supporting IE7. We understand that enterprise applications are not easy to upgrade. They deal with booking services, expense claims, corporate accounts, staffing changes, CRM systems, payroll, etc. Upgrading these expensive systems is not a trivial task. It’s one process that is full of risks. So, it makes sense that these systems are upgraded at large intervals of time, with the process being rigorously controlled and methodically run. It also makes sense that JournalTOCs should be able to be useful to staff working in the NHS and other national organisations from other countries that are in a similar situation to the NHS.

BentoSearch can be used by software developers to implement Ruby on Rails applications to leverage local academic library systems. It supports various relevant proprietary and free search engines such as the discovery services Summon, EDS and Primo, as well as the EBSCOHost and Scopus databases, alongside with Google Books and Google Site Search.

The main developer of BentoSearch is Jonathan Rochkind from Johns Hopkins University Library. He works with APIs to combine functionality from different places into integrated applications. He is using the JournalTOCs API to develop an integrated “Current Articles from This Journal” display into his local library applications. Jonathan has helped us to identify and resolve various issues with the feeds normalized and returned by JournalTOCs API. He has also developed the open source Umlaut software.

BentoSearch full documentation for developers is available here

Examples of implementing the BentoSearch library can be found here

The only requirement to use the JournalTOCs API from BentoSearch is to have an email address registered with JournalTOCs.

You can see a very basic prototype, by looking up journals at:
https://blacklight.library.jhu.edu/umlaut_demo (link resolver demo)
and looking for the “Current Articles” link under “See Also“, if available.

The presentation, entitled “Linking Users and Online Journals in TOCosphere: JournalTOCs in VSSC Library” was given in CALIBER 2013, one of the largest and most important gatherings of academic and research librarians in the Asian subcontinent, that is organised every two years in India.

VSSC is the largest aerospace research centre in India, undertaking intensive research and development activity in technology domains like aeronautics, avionics, composites, etc. with a view to achieve self-reliance in the high tech realm of launch vehicle technology. Since VSSC subscribed to JournalTOCS Premium a few months ago, currently over 380 researchers from VSSC are following 700 different journals.

The driving force behind the implementation of JournalTOCs Premium in VSSC is Narat Narayanankutty, the Head of Periodicals at the VSSC Library. He not only thoroughly tested his customisation and reported errors and things that needed attention but he also prompted further developments and enhancements of the technology of JournalTOCs. Among the features added to JournalTOCs Premium thanks to Narayanankutty is the web interface for super-user accounts to manage the email alerts, the saved searches and followed journals on behalf of patrons.

This case study shows that when working closely, both the service provider and its end- user can mutually enrich and greatly benefit from each other thanks to the synergy created between them. There are more interesting suggestions made by Narayanankutty that are being implemented in JournalTOCs and will be gradually released for the benefit of the whole community of users, including the users of the free JournalTOCs service. Some of his suggestions could mean using JournalTOCs for applications beyond CAS. For example JournalTOCs could be used to alleviate activities faced by some libraries migrating to online only subscription, which is to track and ensure that online journal issues are published and published on time. With print subscriptions a library receives issues against an order and to monitor payments, the receipt of each issue is entered in a system. Thus, there is a clear proof that an issue is received. It is possible to generate a list of missing issues and send a reminder to the publisher or vendor. However, when a library stops print and completely moves to online only, this monitoring activity is not done. Libraries just have to believe the publishers and only when a user indicates that an article is not available the library checks for the reason. Now we have JournalTOCs, from where the publication of new issues can be monitored from a single platform. JournalTOCs regularly receive RSS TOC feeds, and because it records the date when a journal has published a new issue or at least a new article, it could alert libraries when no TOC has been received for a specified period of time. The query can be restricted to subscribed titles of an institution to get a filtered result.

The presentation of VSSC for CALIBER2013 concludes by listing the user feedback and results obtained after four months of JournalTOCs launching:

• JournalTOCs is a simple TOC service
• A service highly rated by VSSC users
• Direct benefit for the e-Resources librarian
• Useful as a light weight discovery service
• Useful for all types of libraries to adopt & promote
• Easy to implement

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing” by R D Laing, Scottish Psychiatrist (1927-1989)

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.

We constantly stumble with “new” titles that are already being used by other journals. This duplication of journal names is particularly notorious in the case of new Open Access (OA) journals. Some publishers just add something superfluous such as “journal”, “research” or even the conjunction “and” to the title to make it look different to a title that is already been published.

A word cloud generated with Wordle from the titles of the 21,350 journals indexed by JournalTOCs looks like this:

The word cloud doesn’t include some common noise words such as journal (removed from 7,400 journal titles, including six ejournal) and 2,034 international. We also have removed from the journal names 7,802 of, 1,026 de, 110 für and 27 di. Perhaps we should have removed Revista (journal in English) which is found in the titles of 648 journals in Spanish. Research was found 1,377 times, Science 1,278 and Studies 771 times.

In this context, duplication is very likely to happen. Doing quick searches with JournalTOCs can expose cases such as:

• Social Sciences (OA journal), Kaunas University of Technology
  Social Sciences (OA journal), MDPI
• Advances in Chemical Engineering, Elsevier
  Advances in Chemical Engineering and Science (OA journal), SRP
• Chemical and Process Engineering, Versita
  Chemical and Process Engineering Research (OA journal), IISTE
• IJCT: Indian Journal of Chemical Technology (OA journal), NISCAIR
  IJCT: International Journal of Chemical Technology (OA journal), Knowledgia Review
• American Journal of Business and Management (OA journal), World Scholars
  American Journal of Industrial and Business Management (OA journal), SRP
• Engineering Management Journal, IET
  Engineering Management Research (OA journal), CCRE
• Human Resource Management Journal, John Wiley & Sons
  Human Resource Management Review, Elsevier
  Human Resource Management Research (OA journal), SAP
• International Journal of Business and Management (OA journal), CCRE
  International Journal of Business and Management Tomorrow (OA journal), IJBMT
• Journal of Management, Sage
  Management (OA journal), SAP
• Organization and Management (OA journal), Versita
  Organization Management Journal, Taylor & Francis
• IJTM: International Journal of Technology Management, Inderscience
  IJTM: International Journal of Technology and Management (OA journal), Science Target (Not accepted by JournalTOCs)

How ethic is to name a new journal using a similar title of a journal that has already been published? Shouldn’t somebody be looking after the journal names being used [and sometimes abused by predatory publishers]?

As it is envisaged that the number of journals will continue increasing, protecting the name of their journals can be a good investment for publishers. This is valid for both seasoned and new titles. The last thing that a consolidated journal would want is to be asked to change its title. On the other hand a genuine and honest new publisher should avoid confusion with any other publications by using distinctive and concise titles. Also, services such as JournalTOCs will double check new journals that have similar names to other journals and the chances for those journals to be rejected are then higher.

How do you protect the name of your journal? Getting an ISSN for a journal doesn’t protect the journal name, and we all know how easy it is to get an ISSN for a journal. The fact is that journal names cannot be copyrighted. The best way to protect a title is to register it as a trademark. Thus a journal title can be registered with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to prevent others from using the journal title to name other journals. To further protect the identity of the journal, publishers can also register a DOI for the journal title. Doing so would increase the chances of the journal to be highly considered and looked at without suspicions. In addition authors and readers will have fewer chances to be misled.

Once you have selected the “Filtered & On Demand (Managed by the super-user)” option, the system will make available for you the “Manage Alerts” link, from where you will be able to edit the content of the user’s alert.

We have added more information to Browse. Browsing By Subject now contains a new column with the number of subscribed journals that your institution has in each subject. Similarly Browsing by Publisher displays a new column with the number of journals you have subscribed per each publisher. For example try http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=browse&subAction=pub. This new column is only available when the user is logged in or when the user has been recognised within the IP range of your institution.

We have added a few more data to the CSV files that you can generate from your Admin interface. We have added to the file of User Accounts a column with the JournalTOCs unique ID for each user. Also, we have added the Access Right column to the file of Followed Journals, so you will be able to see whether the journal belongs to your holdings or not, plus an indication if the title is an OA journal. You could use this information to analyse how many journals outside your subscription are being followed by your users or to see which OA journals are the most popular among your users.

In addition to the allowance of 300 journals given to any user freely registered with JournalTOCs, we have increased the allowance for users who are members of a customised JournalTOCs service, so now your users can follow up to 600 journals.

And don’t forget that anyone can link directly to the TOC of any journal by just using the ISSN number of the journal. For example:
http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=tocs&issn=1741-5276

More information about JournalTOCs *Premium* – the cost-effective customisation service – is available at http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/customise.php

We have expanded the functionality of managing user’s email alerts. Now super-users can activate, deactivate and change the alert frequency of email alerts for their users. Users of customised versions of JournalTOCs can choose from the following alert frequencies:

- Once a day
- Once a week (Weekly Digest)
- Once a month (Monthly Digest), or
- Temporary deactivated (holidays)

A super-user noticed that some of his users were following many journals for which they didn’t have online full-text access. However, the email alerts sent to those users for those journals, were invariably including institutional URLs (e.g. openURL, ezProxy or WAM URLs). A change has been implemented in the alerting system, so now the email alerts include institutional URLs only for the journals for which the institution has full-text access. For the rest of journals, users are provided with the URL of the journal homepage so they can go directly to the publisher site and read the abstracts.

Super-users can disable and enable self-registration from the Admin panel. Until now, any user belonging to an institution with a customised version of JournalTOCs could add himself to the group of users of the customised version. Thus, any user that signed up with JournalTOCs and whose domain email address was the same than the institutional domain email address, was automatically added to the customised version. Now “self-registration” is managed by the super-user account.

Furthermore, super-users can request that the email alert of a specific user be redirected to any other email address. This can be useful for example when a user prefers that his alerts be sent to his private email address rather than his institutional email address.

The group of super-users has become a stimulating powerhouse of ideas, generating innovative changes for the benefit of all the institutions that are using customised versions of JournalTOCs. New features and changes are expected to happen in the coming months in response to the feedback of our super-users, who are the ones who really are steering the development of the super-user account at JournalTOCs.

Here we explain one of the tools available for super-users that have not yet been fully described: “Managing Saved Searches”.

Using your Super-user Account

If you have a super-user account, upon login, you will notice that the list of options for your account includes at the top of that list the “Admin” option, as shown in the following image.

When you click on “Admin” you will access to the Admin Area. The following image shows the links and options available in the Admin Area. You will notice that in the left hand side of your screen, there are four links:

• Accounts: to list the accounts of your users
• Journals: to list the journals that your users are following
• Edit: to manage accounts and journals as well as manage alerts
• CSV: to generate and export your list of users and journals in Excel files

On the above image the accounts of all your users are listed. Clicking on the # Journals heading, the accounts are sorted by the number of journals they are following. At the bottom of the list there are two greyed-out accounts that correspond to users that have not yet confirmed their registrations (inactive accounts).

If you click the “Edit” link the system will display a page similar to the one shown below.

In addition to the four links mentioned above, here you will see an email icon which is a link to re-send activation emails to your users that have not yet acknowledged their new accounts, requesting them to confirm their registration with JournalTOCs. To be able to use their accounts, users need to be active or have confirmed their registration. If you want to save your users from confirming their registrations by themselves, you can confirm their registration on their behalf by clicking the AA link, which is in front of each account name (AA=Activate this Account) For example you could activate the account of User.Email6@yourdoamin.com.

Just in front of each account name, it can be up to four different icons. Each of them is a link to an action, as described below:

: To delete the account that is in front of the icon. The user account will be completely removed from JournalTOCs, including the journals that the user was following.

: This is the link to the “Managing Saved Searches” area and the main subject of this post. Its use is explained in the next section below.

: To re-send an email to an individual user requesting her/his registration confirmation.

AEA: This is the “Activate Email Alerts” link that you will use to enable a user to receive email alerts.

Managing saved searches for your users

In addition of being alerted on new articles published in the journals they are following, users can also create their own email alerts and RSS feeds based on their saved searches. However, some busy users do not have time to create and save search queries and to setup alerts for those queries. The super-user can use the “Managing Saved Searches” option to create saved searches and setup alerts for their busy users.

When you click on the “Managing Saved Searches” icon the system will display a screen similar to that shown below which is showing the saved searches for Some.User@hospital.nhs.uk

Here you will see that Some.User@hospital.nhs.uk has only one saved search for which she/he wants to receive email alerts. We also can see that Some.User@hospital.nhs.uk has recently searched for three different queries and then underneath it you will find a list with your own searches (the searches done from the super-user account). The reason why the system is also showing your search history is to give you the option to add your own searches to the saved searches of your users. This could be useful if you are doing searches on behalf of your users, so after you have done the search, then you can click on the relevant [Save] link to add your search to the saved searches of Some.User@hospital.nhs.uk.

It is advisable to make use of the [Delete] link to remove irrelevant search queries from your search history, so your list of searches doesn’t become too long and you don’t reach your limit of 200 search queries. Having a long list of searches also makes the system slow.

You can save up to 100 search queries per user. To remove a search from the list of saved searches, just click the relevant “Un-save” link. You also can click the “Stop Alert” link to deactivate email alerts for a specific saved search. Click on the RSS icon to generate an RSS feeds containing all the articles that in that moment are matching the specific search query.

 
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.