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.

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 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.

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.

Register your interest with journaltocs@icbl.hw.ac.uk

Today, the Free JournalTOCs trial 2011 has been open. JournalTOCs is offering libraries a free trial of a lightweight scholarly journals tables of contents customisation service. As libraries are faced with financial cutbacks, this trial gives libraries the opportunity to explore a real alternative to expensive database search services.

This trial should suit small to medium academic/college/research/industrial libraries.

The trial on offer is available until the end of April 2011 and will provide each participating library with a searchable and browsable database of the most recent tables of contents of up to 15,200 scholarly journals to which that library subscribes, to be made available within the library’s own website interface. This means that members of the library in question will always be able to click through to the full text of articles found. If desired, features to enable saving of searches, and export of citations to EndNote or RefWorks, can also be included in the trial customisation.

If you’re interested in the fine detail of how the customisation on offer has been implemented by one particular library and what its users thought of it, please read this recent article in the code4Lib Journal http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4134

Each participating library’s customised searchable database will have a simple interface (no complicated bells and whistles). The database will include issues published since 2008. It must be noted that only journals to which the library subscribes which produce Table of contents RSS feeds will be included. To see the 15,200 journals which currently have RSS feeds, go to the JournalTOCs service http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/ These 15,200 journals include 1,650 Open Access journals (selected for its importance) which can, if desired, be included in the trial database. Note that new journals with RSS feeds will be added to JournalTOCs during the trial period.

If your library is interested in taking part in this trial, or if you’d like more information, please register an interest with the ICBL at Heriot-Watt University, via journaltocs@icbl.hw.ac.uk

The trial process cannot be simpler:

1. As soon as you express your interest, JournalTOCs will register a unique ID for your library.
2. A JournalTOCs team member will contact you to provide more information and discuss your particular library database system requirements.
3. In most of the cases a customised API will be installed on your website to interact with the JournalTOCs API
4. The customised API will handle the search and browse of journal TOCs from your website
5. At the end of the trial period you will receive a usage report to help you to take an informed decision.

The trial also offers the hosting option to libraries that don’t want to set up any software on their own web interfaces. Thus if you prefer that the hosting be done at journalTOCs you would only need to supply your list of journal ISSNs with the interface being hosted out-with the institution. In this case, JournalTOCs will provide you with a web admin interface so you could always keep the list of your journals up to date.

As the trial is also an excellent opportunity for JournalTOCs to gain experience working with diverse libraries, the trial is offered at no cost and with no ongoing commitment, but at the end of April, participating libraries will be offered the opportunity to continue the service until the end of 2011 at a cost of Euros 650. This will pay for ongoing technical maintenance and development of the service. The service can be renewed at the end of the year.

This is, therefore, a real low cost alternative to expensive library search database systems.

Yesterday I found this post by Tony Hirst where he reported that unfortunately JournalTOCs didn’t include metadata that identifies whether a journal is Open Access or not. In fact he pointed out that he couldn’t find a service that returns a simplistic “yes/no” response to the query “is the journal with this ISSN an open access journal?” In the same post, Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre commented that he couldn’t believe that we didn’t already have something to do that.

So, today we have added to the API the option to filter journals based on Open Access licensing conditions.

The option has been implemented as part of the journal API call:

http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/journals/query?key=value

So far this call has been used to search for journals. For example to search for journals whose title contains the keywords learning AND technology you will use:

http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/journals/learning technology?output=journals

In the above example the parameter key is output and the parameter value is journals . If you know the ISSN number of a journal (electronic or print ISSN, it doesn’t matter for the API) you will use for example:

http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/journals/1687-7489?output=articles

to retrieve the content of the latest TOC of the journal whose ISSN is 1687-7489.

OK, until now nothing is new. What we have added today are these new parameter values:

- title
- url
- rss
- rights
- issn
- eIssn
- publisher
- subjects

For example to find out whether the journal with ISSN 1687-7489 is Open Access or not, you will use output=rights:

http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/journals/1687-7489?output=rights

The API will return one of these simple texts:
- Subscription
- Free
- Partially Free
- Open Access
- Unknown

You can still identify whether a journal is Open Access or not from the <dc:rights> element provided in the RSS that is returned by queries for journals, without parameters, such as for example

http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/journals/0267-5730

You need to be aware that currently only a thousand of Open Access (OA) journals are indexed by JournalTOCs. A small quantity if we take into account that the number of OA journals is estimated to be more than 6000 journals. There are three reasons why JournalTOCs has such a small number of OA journals:

- Most of the OA journals do not have TOC RSS feeds and very few OA publishers provide OPML to list their journals.

- Quite a lot of OA journals seem to be relatively new, do not have regular issues or haven’t published yet.

- Few OA journals are ranked among the high quality journals. JournalTOCs is very carefully in including only journals that have shown evidence of being scholarly publications.

However, JournalTOCs is working with our OA community to leverage the presence of OA journals in its index. Thus, Roddy MacLeod, our User Community and Marketing Advisor, is using the DOAJ database with the aim of adding more than 500 OA journals by before the end of 2010. We have been liaising with the developers of OJS (probably the most popular Open Source software used by OA journals), with the aim that OJS have their RSS feeds enabled by default, to encourage OA publishers to use the RSS feeds. Coincidently, today System Developer James MacGregor from PKP has informed us that the most recent versions of OJS now have their RSS feeds enabled by default on installation. That is very good news and we would like to encourage OA publishers to upgrade their OJS software and make sure that support for RSS is activated in their OJS installations.

We hope that this new API options be useful to our community of users. Let us know any bug or send us your comments.

Other examples using the new options:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/journals/1687-7489?output=subjects
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/journals/1687-7489?output=rss
etc.