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.

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?)

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!

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.

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.

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.
   

Martha M Loesch, an Assistant Professor and a Catalogue Librarian at the Seton Hall University, rates and describes the advantages of JournalTOCs in an article published in the latest issue of the “Technical Services Quarterly” journal. It is very encouraging that the article highlights the value of the alerting feature of JournalTOCs in keeping one up-to-date with the latest research. However, what it is also important is to receive first-hand feedback on our service from an author who is both an academic researcher and a professional librarian.

JournalTOCs has taken notice of Loesch’s suggestions about its website. There are several improvements that can quickly be implemented, such as, for example, providing the convenience of clicking on the letter of the first word of a publisher’s name on in the Browse by Publisher web pages, rather than producing overly long lists of publishers, as at present.

Loesch also suggests that “the results from an article keyword search in JournalTOCs are currently just titles which may lack meaning without the complete citation, or at least the name of the journal for context.” We will therefore add the journal title for context, in such keyword search results, and full citation if it’s available in the metadata provided by the publishers via their journal TOC RSS feeds.

For those who register (free) with JournalTOCs, it is possible to save article keyword searches, and have them delivered as email alerts, when new content is added. This can be a very effective way of keeping up-to-date with new articles on specific subjects.

In general, a rate of 3.5 out of 5 is quite a good ranking for a service such as JournalTOCs which is being operated with a minimum of resources and a budget that is well below that of the commercial search database providers or library management systems.

RSS feeds are designed to be aggregated and reused by other services and software applications. In general RSS feeds should always be created with this in mind. The Recommendations are in full agreement with this principle.

Back in 2009, two practices were noticed by the ticTOCs Project:

1. there was a wide variation amongst the journal TOC RSS feeds produced by scholarly publishers, and
2. in most of the cases the feeds’ content had very limited information on the articles, such as uniquely the title and the link to the article’s webpage.

Variations in the way publisher implement RSS feeds basically preclude the consistent and automated aggregation of feeds. At the same time, having little content to offer, limit the reusability and value of feeds for other services that want to create interesting applications by combining the feeds. The Recommendations were created to help publishers avoid the inconveniences created by those two practices, and to advocate good practice in the production and provision of TOC RSS feeds for scholarly journals.

There are signs that the Recommendations are gradually being embraced to a certain extent, but how many scholarly publishers have really implemented the Recommendations in their journal TOC RSS feeds? There’s no way to get an exact number, but we can get a good idea of the progress being made by taking a look at the number of journals that are using the four RSS 1.0 modules recommended by the group, namely Admin, Content, Dublin Core and PRISM modules.

Today we have examined the RSS feeds of the journals collected by JournalTOCs to get an approximate picture of how many publishers are making the move. Currently 17,112 journals from 917 publishers are being indexed by JournalTOCs.

Interestingly no journal uses the Admin module in their RSS feeds. Only a few hundreds of subscription journals make use of the Content module. However those two modules are not particularly relevant from the re-usability perspective (the Admin module is intended to be used by consumers of a feed to provide feedback on errors encountered in the feed and the Content module is used to include formatted HTML marked up content for browsers.) The modules that really can give us a good indication of the Recommendations’ uptake are the Dublin Core and PRISM modules.

8,025 journals are using Dublin Core, PRISM or both modules; but only 3,673 of those journals are using both modules.

If we put the figures from the number of publishers’ perspective, 425 publishers are using Dublin Core, PRISM or both modules; and 295 of them use both Dublin Core and PRISM modules.

Regarding Open Access Journals, there are 2,660 Open Access journals in JournalTOCs, and 708 of them have implemented either the Dublin Core or the PRISM module; but only 288 of Open Access journals use both Dublin Core and PRISM modules.

In conclusion: There is still a long way to go. Only 31% of the publishers are using the two main modules and in some extend have adopted the Recommendations. This is equivalent to 22% of the journals. To make a real progress two things should happen: (1) Elsevier, Springer-Verlag and Taylor and Francis together publish over 6,000 journals. A significant step forward will only be made when those three large publishers adopt the Recommendations. (2) An inexplicable low number of Open Access journals have implemented the recommendations. Without proper orientation and guidance, the publishers of OA journals so far haven’t been able to grasp the benefits of adopting best practices and using standard modules for their RSS feeds.

ACTA Press publishes eleven scientific and technical journals in the general areas of engineering and computer science. For example it publishes the International Journal of Computers and Applications (IJCA), an outstanding title, but where is the homepage of this journal? Google will give you this page (Sorry, Google seems to be a year behind). Other sources will point to here or here. Can you find a unique or persistent URL for IJCA’s homepage? We couldn’t find it. It seems that its “homepage” changes with every issue. The same happens with all ACTA Press journals. Their journal TOC RSS feeds have a sub-standard implementation too. For example IJCA’s RSS feeds point to this page or here, but all that you get from those RSS feeds are “Object moved” messages. The RSS link shown at the bottom of all IJCA pages point to an “Acta Press New Papers” feeds which in fact is a list of relatively new papers published in conference proceedings! That is confusing. Worse, if you go to the proceedings section you will see that actually those RSS feeds are out of date or one year behind.

The International Society for Computers and Their Applications (ISCA) publishes the International Journal of Computers and Their Applications (IJCA). There is no mention of an OA option for authors. However, ISCA’s instructions for authors say: “After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author will be invoiced a page charge of $35.00 USD per printed page to cover part of the cost of publication.” Does that mean the papers are OA? Nope. In fact this is a subscription journal. There is no need to navigate through all IJCA pages to immediately feel that you have travelled 10 years back in the past. Its web pages are pre Web 1.0! Although ISCA claims that the journal is abstracted and indexed by Scopus, INSPEC and DBLP, and we can see that the journal webpage displays an impressive list of Editorial Board members, it is not possible to gauge its value. Can I see the abstracts? Nope. Links to full-texts, citations or to something? No, there are not links to any content at all. DOIs are not used. Of course there is not a remote mention of RSS feeds in this international journal of computer sciences.

Why these two journals are not up to the web technology standards expected for journals specialising in computer sciences?

While their values have not yet been defined, all John Wiley’s journal TOC RSS feeds include a <dc:rights> element in each of their items.

The granularity of this development would enable aggregators, discovery systems and other bibliographic services to provide accurate information about the full-text access rights for a particular paper. Thus, for example we would be able to alert end-users when an Open Access paper has been published in a hybrid (open access) journal.

A hybrid journal is a closed or subscription journal that also publishes Open Access papers.

Notably John Wiley has various hybrid journals. Hybrid journals are considered as a transitional model by some publishers and an optional publishing model by others. The publishers said (on the whole) that it is easier to start new pure Open Access journals than to transition a subscription journal.

Nevertheless, we are aware that there is a lot of Open Access (OA) papers published in hybrid journals that are not being systematically identified as OA by aggregators and discovery systems. This is an issue that would be solved by using <dc:rights> or CC-BY licensing in the RSS feeds at the item level.

In a recent message sent by Peter Murray-Rust to the Open Bibliography list when talking about “Open Science Bibliography – where can I find Open Access papers on … ?“, Peter concluded: “The attraction of this is that the results can go straight into CKAN (metadata about open access) and Open Bibliography. Obviously full open access publishers (BMC, PLoS) are straightforward. Hybrid journals (e.g. Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, ACS) are the most immediate gain. This will locate and publicize the Open Access papers, even when hidden in traditional closed journals.”

Our interest at JournalTOCs is to make easier or evident the identification of OA papers published in hybrid journals. At the moment we only can identify OA at the journal level. In that sense we look forward of reusing the new John Wiley’s TOC RSS feeds to identify OA at the paper level from hybrid journals.

This is precisely the scenario that aggregators and discovery systems are facing with the 1,600 journal TOC RSS feeds of Taylor & Francis.

Since Monday 27th June, when Taylor & Francis moved its journals platform from Informaworld to Tandfonline, the previous URLs for all the Taylor & Francis journal TOC RSS feeds are returning the infamous “Page Not Found” webpage. Although we were informed by Taylor & Francis that they have redirects in place for those TOC RSS feeds, the fact is that as today, those TOC RSS URLs are still unable to be redirected to their new web addresses.

This “Page Not Found” problem could have been easily avoided if Taylor & Francis had had an up-to-date OPML file listing the RSS feeds for all their journals. Aggregators, service discovery and individual RSS users would have been able to automatically and immediately update the URLs for the TOC RSS feeds by just consulting the OPML file.

In general OPML allows RSS feed aggregators and indexers to more easily find the TOC RSS feeds exposed from a particular publisher website. OPML is a standard XML file that is used to describe a simple list of RSS feeds that includes the title of the feed, a link to the home page of the feed (e.g. the journal homepage), and a link to the RSS feed itself.

Annual Reviews, Biomed Central Ltd., BMJ Publishing Group, Elsevier, Inderscience Publishers, Institute of Physics (IOP), Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press (OUP) and Érudit are the pioneering publishers that are using OPML files to enable aggregators to dynamically detect any change in the list of journals they publish. When their OPML would get updated, so would the aggregators.

Publishers are therefore recommended to publish OPML documents that list all of the feeds from their websites and in particular for their current issues. Unfortunately publishers that don’t have OPML files listing their current journals are not able to prevent information on their journals from growing stale at the aggregators’ databases.

Unlike RSS feeds, there is no standard way to link to an OPML file from the publisher website. However publishers are advised to put a link to their OPML files on a suitable and freely available webpage. For example Inderscience provides a link to its OPML file here.