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.

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.

The latest release 1.0.2 of BentoSearch, the Open Source Ruby on Rails library layer to search and display results from external search engines, has implemented support for JournalTOCs API to provide a look-up for journal current articles.

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 Library of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), a hub for development of satellite launch vehicles and associated technologies of the Government of India, has presented a case study discussing the benefits of using JournalTOCs to manage the delivery of a current awareness service (CAS) for their researchers.

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)

With so many journals appearing everyday it is no wonder publisher and prospective publishers are running out of names for their journal titles, and an unavoidable consequence of this is duplication.

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.