A new and much improved version of ticTOCs, the free journal Tables of Contents Service, is now available!

As well as a number of changes to the interface, content now includes 7,733 journal Tables of Contents (TOCs), with details of 170,107 articles, collected from 72 publishers, including most of the TOCs that have been mentioned previously in this blog.

You can use ticTOCs in two main ways:

1. To locate RSS feeds for scholarly journal tables of contents, and then import them into your favourite RSS aggregator or feedreader, either individually using the Get TOC feed links, or in bulk, using the OPML Export link.

2. To locate and view journal TOCs and their latest content, link to the full text of articles, save TOCs to MyTOCs with a single ‘tick’, and export items in TOCs to RefWorks. In order to permanently save your MyTOCs you’ll need to register (simple, and free).

You can search for TOCs by keyword(s) or phrases in journal titles, or browse TOCs by publisher.

Coverage currently favours technology subjects, and does not yet include all Elsevier titles, but there’s more to come shortly, plus subject access and continuously updated content, etc.

ticTOCs collects and displays data from RSS feeds as provided by the publishers, so you may notice that some TOCs include more information than others. We’re working with CrossRef on recommendations for best practice which will cover what information publishers should include in journal TOC RSS feeds, and the best way to structure that information.

ticTOCs - the free current awareness service where researchers keep up-to-date.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCS Management Support

There’s a brief report on the spineless? blog about the presentation RSS and current awareness: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are hoping to improve the academic information landscape, given at the Inforum 2008 conference last week.

Rody MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

A brief report from the ticTOCs breakout session at UKSG Annual Conference 2008 is available.  This includes a summary of some feedback on future development ideas for the ticTOCs service.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

The interest that has been generated among South African publishers and editors has made it possible for Sabinet Online to grow its SA ePublications Service from the 40 online titles that were included in the service when it was launched in June 2002, to the 235 online journals that are currently included in the service. 44 of these South African journals are available on Open Access via their Open Access Journal Collection, providing immediate access to the PDF versions of 6 000+ full-text articles.

Details of Tables of Contents (TOC) RSS feeds for all 235 journals are available from Sabinet.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

There’s an article entitled RSS Feeds: Managing the Mechanism by Martin Belam, in the March issue of fumsi which explains how to manage RSS feeds, and more.  As can be seen in this excellent article, the process can become quite complicated.

With respect to journal TOC RSS feeds, one of the purposes of ticTOCs will be to simplify the  process.  ticTOCs will do much of the donkey work for you.  No need to choose software, prune feeds, mark all as read, etc.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

In a previous post, I mentioned the Gold Dust project. Like ticTOCs, Gold Dust has also been funded via the JISC Users & Innovation programme, and also like ticTOCs, Gold Dust will be dealing with RSS feeds. However, Gold Dust is a quite different project. Rather than service development, which is at the core of ticTOCs, Gold Dust is more of a research orientated project. In addition, Gold Dust will deal with a number of different categories of RSS feeds, and not just journal Tables of Contents (TOCs).

Gold Dust will use ticTOCs usage logs for a group of 50 volunteer engineering researchers and will analyse those logs, which contain metadata, in order to produce Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs). Text mining techniques will then used to match these PIPs with content found in numerous selected, potentially relevant, RSS feeds on subjects related to engineering, such as calls for papers, new dissertations and theses, news from professional societies, new patents, and so on. The project will then investigate ways to deliver the resulting highly personalised content in a flexible way at a place of the user’s choice.

A diagram is available which shows some of the basic ideas behind Gold Dust.

Gold Dust is being lead by the University of Hull, and Heriot-Watt University is undertaking much of the technical development.

For more information, please visit the Gold Dust project website.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

This blog has been quiet for some time now, but this does not mean that we’ve not been busy!

By mid-May, we will release a new and improved prototype, with various features, including a facility to log-in and save TOCs, subject browse and a directory of nearly 7,000 TOCs from numerous publishers. TOCs have been added for journals from Portland Press, Thomas Telford/ICE, IUCR, Hesperia, WARC, Revues, the American Heart Association, and other publishers.

Geoff Bilder, from CrossRef, one of the partners in the ticTOCs project, has been chairing a working party which has been drafting recommendations for best practice, covering what information publishers should include in journal TOC RSS feeds, and the best way to structure that information. When these are available, an announcement will be made in this blog.

An article has appeared in Multimedia Information & Technology, 34(1), February 2008, pp. 14-16, entitled: ticTOCs - Taking the pain out of RSS for journal tables of contents.

Two breakout sessions on The ticTOCs Project were held at the UKSG 2008 conference in Torquay, UK. The sessions were well attended and there was interest from the publishers present as well as librarians. The presentation was in five parts - RSS TOCs in context; the ticTOCs project outline; a demo of the two pilots; standards; development ideas.

Slides are at http://www.slideshare.net/libram/the-tictocs-project-transforming-current-awareness/

Attendees were asked for their opinions on several development ideas. Generally speaking, opinion seemed divided over the potential usefulness of enabling search within all articles in the ticTOCs database; opinion was strongly in favour of enabling the export of items to bibliographic management software such as RefWorks from within ticTOCs; in favour of the idea of providing alerts by email and/or other formats; strongly in favour of enabling the filtering of long TOCs; and in favour of facilitating the re-presenting of TOCs and OPML files of TOC feeds in blogs and other websites.

In future posts, and once the new prototype is available, we hope to ask for opinions from readers of this blog on various development ideas.

A paper on ticTOCs, and the associated Gold Dust project will be given at the Inforum conference at the end of May, entitled RSS and current awareness: how two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are hoping to improve the academic information landscape.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

RSS feeds for the latest issues of all Inderscience Publishers journals are now available.  As there are currently 189 journals, I won’t list them here.  However from each journal homepages within the Inderscience website you can click on the orange RSS icon or the Latest TOC link to get the feeds.

e.g.
http://www.inderscience.com/current_issues/ijnm.rss

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

This is a short (7 slides) powerpoint presentation showing the constituent parts of the planned ticTOCs service.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

Portland Press, the publishing subsidiary of the Biochemical Society, have kindly sent us details of their journal TOC RSS feeds. Their own RSS feed list is available.

Biochemical Journal

BJ Central Immediate Publications (The Complete Works)
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps.xml

BJ Cell Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_2.xml

BJ Disease Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_3.xml

BJ Energy Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_1.xml

BJ Gene Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_4.xml

BJ Plant Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_6.xml

BJ Signal Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_7.xml

BJ Structure Immediate Publications
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/imps_5.xml

BJ Central Current Issue (The Complete Works)
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc.xml

BJ Cell Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_2.xml

BJ Disease Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_3.xml

BJ Energy Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_1.xml

BJ Gene Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_4.xml

BJ Plant Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_6.xml

BJ Signal Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_7.xml

BJ Structure Current Issue
http://www.biochemj.org/bj/rss/toc_5.xml

Biochemical Society Transactions

Current Issue
http://www.biochemsoctrans.org/bst/rss/toc.xml

Biology of the Cell

Immediate Publications
http://www.biolcell.org/boc/rss/imps.xml

Current Issue
http://www.biolcell.org/boc/rss/toc.xml

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry

Immediate Publications
http://www.babonline.org/bab/rss/imps.xml

Current Issue
http://www.babonline.org/bab/rss/toc.xml

Clinical Science

Immediate Publications
http://www.clinsci.org/cs/rss/imps.xml

Current Issue
http://www.clinsci.org/cs/rss/toc.xml

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support