Recommendations on RSS Feeds released

We are pleased to announce that the Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers drawn up by the Recommendations Working Group as part of the JISC funded ticTOCs project have now been released to the public. They can be found at;

http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2009/10/recommendations_on_rss_feeds_f.html

ticTOCs update

The ticTOCs service will shortly be transferring from the development server that has been its home since its beginning to a more robust and stable live server.  It is anticipated that disruption will be minimal. This will also provide us with the ideal opportunity to streamline and improve the database and the maintenance procedures.  The exact date for migration has not been specified yet but we will announce it here when it is confirmed.

New Helpdesk

The new ticTOCs helpdesk has been successfully set up and implemented in conjunction with our colleagues at MIMAS.  All enquiries submitted via the ticTOCs site will be channelled and tracked through the MIMAS helpdesk system.

Brief update on recent ticTOCs activity.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins titles are in the process of moving to a new platform and their details have been updated accordingly in ticTOCs.

We will monitor the progress and changes to ensure consistency with the details in our database.

New simplified registration procedure

To simplify and speed up the new user registration process, we have removed the need for new users to confirm their registration.  A small number of new users had experienced difficulties confirming their accounts.  We appreciate this can be very frustrating so to minimize any potential delay we will be allowing new users to register and access their account without the need for waiting for a confirmation e-mail.

Updated FAQ pages

Some general maintenance work on the ticTOCs site has been done, particularly with the FAQ pages.

We have;

Updated:

 Q. Why should I register with ticTOCs?

 Q. Who funds ticTOCs?

 Q. How can I export TOC feeds into another feed reader?

 Q. My institution doesn’t subscribe to RefWorks. How can I turn off the RefWorks links?

 And

 Added:

 Q. Do you provide APIs?

 Q. How does ticTOCs compare to Zetoc?

 Q. How can I access full-text journals off-campus?

ticTOCs and Zetoc RSS – what are the differences?

Some people have asked what are the differences between ticTOCs and Zetoc RSS?  I’ll try to explain, but this may involve a fair amount of detail.

Before describing some of the similarities and differences betwen ticTOCs and Zetoc RSS, I should explain that those who are involved in maintaining Zetoc have also played a role in the ticTOCs project, and the Heriot-Watt contingent of the ticTOCs project is continuing to work with Zetoc and the Discovery to Delivery at Edina and Mimas (D2D@E&M) project to share information and data.

1. Background

ticTOCs was developed by a consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.   The project was funded by JISC through the U&I Programme.

Zetoc RSS is one part of the Zetoc service.  Zetoc provides access to the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents of journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. The Zetoc database covers 1993 to date, and is updated on a daily basis. It includes an email alerting service, with relevant new articles and papers.  The BL provides Mimas with the data for the Zetoc service, to which Mimas add Biomed Central (open access) content.  For more details about the background to Zetoc, see the About Zetoc page.

2. Availability

ticTOCs is freely available to anyone, anywhere.

Zetoc RSS is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK higher and further education institutions and research councils. It is also available to all of NHS England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A number of other institutions are eligible to subscribe to Zetoc.

3. Numbers

There are 27,209 journals in Zetoc RSS and 12,387 journals in ticTOCs. Many journals are in both, roughly 2,300 are in ticTOCs only, and 17,400 in Zetoc only.

4. Contents

ticTOCs contains the latest TOCs for ejournals where publishers have made RSS feeds of TOCs available.

Zetoc RSS contains TOCs that have been rekeyed from around 17,000 print journals.

5. Searching

You can search ticTOCs for journals by title, publisher or subject and then view them in the ticTOCs site.  As yet, you cannot search across the contents of ticTOCs.

You can search Zetoc RSS for journals by journal name or by words or phrases in journal titles.  You can also browse Zetoc RSS for journals by subject category.  Zetoc Search includes content back to 1993 which can be searched, and you can request email alerts based on keyword/phrase and/or author via Zetoc Alert.

6. Abstracts

About half of the TOCs in ticTOCs contain abstracts.

No TOCs in Zetoc RSS contain abstracts apart from the Biomed Central content.

7. Current awareness

ticTOCs can be used as a standalone current awareness service by registering (free), then saving selected journal titles to ‘MyTOCs’, and when you revisit the site new content (i.e. new TOCs) will be indicated in your MyTOCs in bold. Over 2,800 people have so far registered to use ticTOCs in this way. Unfortunately, alerts are not yet in place, so you need to remember to return to the ticTOCs website!

Zetoc Alert provides email alerting.

8. Exporting feeds

You can use ticTOCs to get the RSS feed for single journal TOCs (search for TOCs, display a TOC and click on Export feed to…), or collected TOCs (add some TOCs to MyTOCs and then Export selected) for use in other feedreaders.

Zetoc RSS enables you to subscribe to feeds for individual journals through feedreaders.

9. Feed origins

The RSS feeds from ticTOCs that you can export to other feedreaders are the feeds as provided by publishers.  Publishers sometimes structure their TOC RSS feeds in different ways.

The RSS feeds from Zetoc RSS that you can export to other feedreaders are feeds from Zetoc and are identically structured.

10. Display

When you view a TOC in ticTOCs, the display has been ‘normalised’ to make it appear in a more standard way.  If you export a feed from ticTOCs and use it in another feedreader, because the feed will then come directly from the publisher, it will not be normalised and the display may not be consistent with feeds for TOCs from other publishers.  If the publisher changes that feed, it may even disappear.

All Zetoc RSS feeds are displayed in the same way.

12. Bibliographic management

When viewing TOCs in ticTOCs, you can export citations to RefWorks (if you have a RefWorks account), by clicking on the RefWorks icon.

Zetoc Search supports export.  You can save your hit list, or tag select records from your hit list as a text file by using the ‘download’ button at the top of the screen. You can usually import this text file into a local database, such as EndNote or Reference Manager, but you will need to have the correct import filter for this.  Some software includes a filter for Zetoc, and some filters are available to download from the Z39.50 access pages on Zetoc. Some bibliographic software allows you to make a connection to Zetoc and directly import your results. See the Z39.50 access pages for further information.

13.  Access to full text

You will be able to access articles via ticTOCs if they are Open Access, or if you are entitled to IP authenticated access to that content or if you have appropriate passwords.  ticTOCs doesn’t support OpenURL resolver software.  Access for an institution’s off-campus users can be achieved if that institution has EZproxy or WAM.  ticTOCs does not yet offer OpenURL links but for feeds that include DOIs in their TOCs you could either configure a LibX toolbar for your institution that will turn DOIs into OpenURLs, or you may be able to redirect DOIs to your link resolver using a cookie (SFX can do this).

Zetoc RSS feeds include OpenURL-based ‘COinS’, which can be sent to any resolver software specified by the user.  Zetoc Search supports OpenURL resolver software, enabling users to link from the Zetoc full record to the range of services defined by their institution.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

Serendipity makes a return, thanks to ticTOCs

According to the Wikipedia, Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely.

As far as new material in scholarly journals is concerned, serendipitous discovery often used to happen when researchers physically browsed new issues of print journals displayed in ‘current issues’ sections in their libraries, or as new issues were circulated between researchers.  There were other methods as well – some libraries/information centres circulated photocopies of contents pages of journals to researchers.  Both of these things still happen, of course, but to a much less degree than in the past.  In the Library that I work, we still have a small current issues section, but it is rarely used nowadays.

A rare sighting of someone browsing the latest journal issues in a library

In the digital world, seredipity isn’t always so easy.

However, the Internet has made it possible to browse journal issues at publishers’ websites, and also for researchers to subscribe to journal tables of content by email.  Two examples (of many) include SAGE E-mail Alerts and Inderscience Table of Contents (ToC) Alerting. 

Delivery of TOCs by email is very popular, and can work well, but it can also sometimes be intrusive to receive such emails, and it can take effort and numerous passwords and logins to manage such subscriptions at multiple-publisher websites.  One commentator went as far as to say “Some users reported that the alerts they themselves had set ‘haunted them’.  I have exactly the same feeling, as sometimes it feels like the alerts I have set for myself are self-inflicted spam.”  [Jonas Holmstrom: Report on 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004)].

This is where ticTOCs can help.  ticTOCs the free journal tables of contents service, can make it much easier to discover things by serendipity.  You don’t end up getting lots of email TOC alerts, and you only have to remember one password.

First, you need to register (which is free) with ticTOCs.  Then, search for journals of interest and save them to your MyTOCs.  You can now browse the contents of the latest Tables of Contents of those journals.  The next time you return to ticTOCs and Sign in, any journals with new TOCs will be indicated in bold.  So the only thing you need to do is remember to come back to ticTOCs on a regular basis.

Once you’ve added all journal titles of interest to your MyTOCs, scanning their contents is easy, and it’s very likely that you’ll discover items of interest by seredipity.

If you want, you can Export Selected feeds to other feed readers, so you may not even need to revisit ticTOCs.  But we hope that you will, because we regularly add new journal TOCs.

A couple of years ago, Lorcan Dempsey, a well-known figure in the information world and Vice President, OCLC Programs and Research and Chief Strategist, wrote “…serendipity is important, and there is an obvious imperative here: we need to make our data work harder to support the much enhanced opportunities for serendipity our network services provide.”  With respect to new material in scholarly journals, this is one of the things that ticTOCs is helping to achieve.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

ticTOCS.ac.uk  will be temporarily unavailable during 16th February as a result of necessary maintenance.  We will try to keep the down time to a minimum and would like apologise for the inconvenience.

Six ways to use ticTOCs, the free journal tables of contents service

There’s a number of different ways that you can use ticTOCs - the journal tables of contents service.  These are my top six:

1. The most obvious way to use ticTOCs is to ‘Search for TOCs’ for a particular journal title, or for journals on a particular subject or by a particular publisher, and then view the most recent Table of Content (TOC) (by clicking on the title), expand any item of interest to see more details (where the publisher has made these available), and click on article titles to get the full text (where institutional or personal subscription allows).  In this way, and even if you don’t have access to the full text of everything, you can keep up with the latest articles being published.  ticTOCs now contains TOCs for over 12,000 scholarly journals from 436 publishers. This is by no means all of the scholarly journals being published, but it does include journals from most large publishers.

2. If you want to keep up-to-date with what’s being published on a regular basis, then you can register with ticTOCs (it’s free), and then select and add your favourite journals to MyTOCs by ticking the checkboxes from your search results and clicking Add. This will permanently save your selected journals.  The next time you return to ticTOCs and Sign In, any journal TOCs with new content will appear in bold in your MyTOCs.  All you have to do is remember to return to ticTOCs at regular intervals.

3. The third thing you can do is export a particular TOC feed to another feedreader, such as Bloglines or Newsgator, or a service such as Netvibes or Pageflakes.  To do this, ‘Search for TOCs’ for a particular journal title, or for journals on a particular subject or by a particular publisher, and then view the most recent Table of Content (TOC) (by clicking on the title).  Then click on the Export feed to… button and make your choice of feed readers.

4.  As the Organization Monkey blog has shown, and as detailed in the ticTOCs Help page, if you select a number of journals of interest in MyTOCs, and then click on the Export Selected button, you can create an OPML file containing details of your selected TOCs, and then import that file into another feedreader, such as Google Reader.  This allows to to export a number of TOC feeds all in one go.

5. The fourth thing you can do is link to a particular journal TOC.  To do this, ‘Search for TOCs’ and when the one you are interested in is included in the left hand panel, right click on the title and select ‘Copy Link Location’ or ‘Copy Shortcut’ (depending on the browser you are using) and then you can use that web addess to link to the TOC of that journal.  For example, http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/?action=displayJournal&journalId=15711 takes you to the TOC of  International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets takes, displayed within ticTOCs, and http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/?action=displayJournal&journalId=9512 takes you to the TOC of Managerial Finance, etc.  Librarians, in particular, should find this useful, as there’s no need to confuse readers with details of RSS!  In a similar way, if you are a publisher or the webmaster of a journal’s home page, you can put a link to the ticTOCs address for that journal so that anyone can easily view the latest TOC.  For example, the Journal of Information Literacy (JIL) has done this.  Here’s another example.

6. The sixth thing you can do is export a bibliographic reference to RefWorks. To do this, click on the   image. Of course, you, or your institution, will need to have a subscription to RefWorks for this to work. We’re working on introducing some more bibliographic management tools.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support