“Get latest articles from journals via the library”
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.
Tags: Community engagement, JOurnalTOCs API, Use Cases
Most Followed Open Access Journals
This ranking presents the Open Access (OA) journals that have attracted the largest number of followers among JournalTOCs community of users in 2011. Only the top 30 most followed OA journals are included and compared in this list. An OA journal is a scholarly journal that does not charge readers for reading and using the full-text of its articles.
| NF | Title | Publisher | FPP | SSS | JIF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 156 | D-Lib Magazine | CNRI | Free | CS | – |
| 84 | J. of Information Literacy | Loughborough U. Library | Free | OJS | – |
| 66 | J. of Digital Information | Texas AM U. Libraries | Free | OJS | – |
| 63 | J of Library and Info. Science | Nat. Taiwan Normal U. | Free | OJS | – |
| 63 | J. of Library Innovation | WNYLRC | Free | OJS | – |
| 58 | College and Research Libraries | ALA | Free | CS | – |
| 51 | Communications in Info. Literacy | CIL | free | OJS | – |
| 50 | Library and Info. Research | CILIP | N/A | N/A | – |
| 50 | Future Internet | MDPI | $570 | CS | – |
| 50 | Ariadne Magazine | UKOLN | free | N/A | – |
| 48 | Annals of Library & Info. Studies | NISCAIR | free | DSpace | – |
| 45 | Evidence Based Library and Info. Practice | U. of Alberta Learning Services | free | OJS | – |
| 38 | Code4Lib Journal | Code4lib | free | – | |
| 36 | PLoS ONE | PLoS | $1350 | EMS | 4.41 |
| 36 | Int. J. of Legal Information | Int. Assoc. of Law Libraries | free | – | |
| 35 | PLoS Biology | PLoS | $2900 | EMS | 12.47 |
| 32 | BMC Cell Biology | Biomed Central Ltd. | $1845 | CS | 2.46 |
| 32 | Information | MDPI | $260 | CS | – |
| 30 | New Knowledge Environments | University of Victoria | Free | OJS | – |
| 27 | BMC Public Health | Biomed Central Ltd. | $1845 | CS | 2.36 |
| 26 | Advances in Environmental Sciences | Bioflux Society | $200 | CS | – |
| 26 | J. of Electronic Publishing, The | MPublishing | Free | – | |
| 26 | Int. J. of Digital Curation | UKOLN | Free | OJS | – |
| 24 | BMC Bioinformatics | Biomed Central Ltd. | $1845 | CS | 3.03 |
| 24 | Info. Technologies & Int. Development | Georgia Inst. of Technology | Free | OJS | – |
| 22 | Obstetrics and Gynecology Int. | Hindawi Publishing Corp. | $1000 | CS | – |
| 21 | Computational Linguistics | MIT Press | Free | OJS | 2.97 |
| 21 | First Monday | U. of Illinois at Chicago U. | Free | OJS | – |
| 17 | J. of Communications | Academy Publisher | $470 | EDAS | – |
| 15 | JIPITEC | Digital Peer Publishing | Free | – | |
| CC BY 2.0 JournalTOCs Dec.2011 | |||||
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.
Tags: OA Journals, Publishers
“JournalTOCs; http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk”
By Martha Fallahay Loesch
Published in the “Technical Services Quarterly”, Volume 29, Issue 1, 2011, Taylor & Francis.
DOI: 10.1080/07317131.2012.624916
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.
Tags: Community engagement, User Feedback
Percentage of scholarly publishers that have adopted the Recommendations on RSS Feeds
It is now two years since the ticTOCs Best Practice Recommendation group, headed by CrossRef and consisting of members from Talis, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press and Heriot-Watt University; published the “Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers.”
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:
- there was a wide variation amongst the journal TOC RSS feeds produced by scholarly publishers, and
- 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.
Tags: Community engagement, normalization, Publishers, RSS Best Practices, TOC RSS feeds
The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot
One might expect that journals in computer science are using the latest computer science technologies to publish their journals. Well that is not always the case. For example we found two publishers in computer sciences that do not give their own publications platforms the benefit of their “expertise”.
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?
