Here’s a quick survey of some Open Access (OA) journals added recently to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I wanted to see how many of the newly added titles had RSS feeds for their Tables of Contents (TOCs).
There are many reasons why all scholarly journals should produce a TOC RSS feed. Lisa Rogers wrote RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers which explains how RSS is an effective sharing mechanism for journal TOCs, and a CrossRef working group produced Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers which explains good practice.
RSS feed consumption can occur through many feed aggregators, such as Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines, etc. Some journal TOC RSS feeds have hundreds of subscribers via each of these services, and this drives considerable traffic to their sites.
The large and successsful commercial publishers all know the benefits of producing journal TOC RSS feeds – Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, Informa, John Wiley and Sons, Sage Publications, Biomed Central Ltd, Wolters Kluwe, Emerald, Thieme Publishing Group, MedKnow Publishers, Nature Publishing Group, Brill Academic Publisher, Maney Publishing – and many more, produce TOC RSS feeds for their journals.
TOC RSS feeds are ripe for aggregation in other ways, through such services as JournalTOCs (where as well as finding over 14,000 journal TOCs, you can also search the contents of TOCs and get RSS feeds for search results), ticTOCs, and Zetoc RSS. These services help researchers find the latest scholarly articles, and in turn drive traffic to journal websites. There’s also subject-based services such as TechJournalContents which make it easy to search the current issues of technology journals.
TOC RSS feeds can also be re-used in various ways. For example, the JournalTOCs API gives access to an entire database of articles, journals and publishers, collected from the publishers’ own TOC RSS feeds, as soon as they are published on the web. Search results come in RSS format, which can then be parsed and used in other environments, or an RSS reader, or the search results can be included in other web page. Localised versions of JournalTOCs are also possible, providing a library’s users with a current awareness service which guarantees 100% access to the full text of subscribed titles.
Jönköping University has integrated ticTOCs RSS TOC data with it’s catalogue (so that users can view the TOC from the library catalogue) and Wageningen Digital Library has done similar.
So, journal TOC RSS feeds have many benefits and uses, and help to expose scholarly journals to a wide audience.
But, to get back to the main subject of this post, how many Open Access journals are taking advantage of all of this and producing RSS TOC feeds? Hindawi is one notable example (feeds available here at JournalTOCs). What about other OA journals?
I looked at the weekly RSS feed of new journals added to the DOAJ. Of the recent OA titles added to DOAJ I found that only a few were producing feeds:
* Even though Open Journal Systems, through which a growing number of OA journals are published, has a plugin giving the option to generate nice RSS 1.0 feeds with prism etc, not all OJS journals produce RSS TOC feeds. I really don’t understand why!
All publishers of Open Access journals should ask themselves the following question “Over 14,000 journals from nearly 500 publishers now make available RSS Tables of Contents feeds. Does mine?”
Follow me on Twitter: @libram
Good post Roddy, i was unaware of the JournalTOCs API.
In doing my work I’ve found that there are likely well over 250,000 web services or APIs available. The best directory of these services only lists 10% of them while most are well under 1%.
Until everything becomes discretely consumable by software all internet based intelligence and knowledge will remain scattered.
By: dave tribbett on April 6, 2010
at 1:09 pm
Rods! I don’t think the old codger brigade from the swimming pool could handle this. I think you’ll have to phone the police. Hotboy
By: hotboy on April 6, 2010
at 1:28 pm
[...] 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment Roddy MacLeod has a new post arguing that open access journals need to add more RSS feeds. From the post: TOC [...]
By: Open Access Journals Need More RSS « on April 8, 2010
at 2:55 am
[...] by CrossRef. Scholarly journals without TOC RSS feeds are missing out on a great free deal, as I explained last week. EICC Lunch Some stands at UKSG W Approach [...]
By: UKSG « Roddy Macleod's Blog on April 13, 2010
at 10:18 am
[...] the newly added titles have RSS feeds for their Tables of Contents (TOCs). As I pointed out in this recent post, there are many advantages of having TOC RSS feeds. The list is taken from the weekly RSS feed of [...]
By: More Open Access journals with/without TOC RSS feeds « Roddy Macleod's Blog on April 15, 2010
at 12:51 am
[...] In this post, he explains why table of contents RSS feeds are so important for open access journals. [...]
By: Roddy MacLeod on Open Access Journals, Tables of Contents, and RSS « ResourceShelf on May 3, 2010
at 9:02 am
[...] 3. Sciyo is “a fast-growing open access scientific publisher, enabling barrier-free access to the latest research developments, knowledge and ideas within the field of Science and Technology.” Resources include 154 books which are published under Creative Commons 3.0 License and 3 journals. It’s a pity that their journals don’t have TOC RSS feeds. [...]
By: 10 interesting websites #8, as selected by Roddy MacLeod « Roddy Macleod's Blog on May 26, 2010
at 10:15 am
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 10 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on December 29, 2010
at 2:27 pm
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 12 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on January 17, 2011
at 12:34 pm
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 8 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on January 24, 2011
at 10:31 am
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 6 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on February 2, 2011
at 12:09 am
[...] This is a shame. Not only can I not add them to JournalTOCs, but the journals in question are missing out in various other ways. Why, oh why, do so many OA journals not have RSS TOC [...]
By: New Open Acces journals which do not seem to have RSS TOC feeds « Roddy Macleod's Blog on February 4, 2011
at 10:25 pm
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 7 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on February 9, 2011
at 1:01 pm
[...] Filter by Dates & Max Items original copy This entry was posted in Articles. Bookmark the permalink. ← What Goes Around Comes [...]
By: Many Open Access (OA) journals don’t have Table of Contents RSS feeds, and they are therefore missing out a great deal. « Roddy Macleod’s Blog | Write A Blog on February 13, 2011
at 10:29 pm
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 50 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on February 17, 2011
at 2:30 pm
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 19 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on February 28, 2011
at 2:10 am
[...] Previous journals added are listed here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. [...]
By: 15 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on March 19, 2011
at 12:31 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 13 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on March 31, 2011
at 2:29 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 40 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on April 5, 2011
at 10:13 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 49 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on April 25, 2011
at 2:34 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 24 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on May 23, 2011
at 1:51 pm
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 16 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on May 30, 2011
at 7:56 am
[...] needs to be done. OA journals cannot fail to notice the power of RSS. As Roddy has expressed here, there are many reasons why all scholarly journals should produce a TOC RSS feed. All the large and [...]
By: JournalTOCs Blog » Blog Archive » Are OA journals frightened of TOC RSS feeds? on June 10, 2011
at 10:39 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 22 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on June 17, 2011
at 12:49 pm
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 11 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on June 29, 2011
at 9:36 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 51 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on July 18, 2011
at 10:26 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 67 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on August 3, 2011
at 2:02 pm
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 20 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on August 12, 2011
at 12:14 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 36 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on October 11, 2011
at 2:48 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 17 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on October 25, 2011
at 6:38 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 21 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on November 10, 2011
at 1:42 pm
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 10 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on November 15, 2011
at 10:04 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 59 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on December 2, 2011
at 3:00 am
[...] here. Unfortunately, many other OA journals do not produce TOC RSS feeds – see my post on why they should. See also why any journal, OA or otherwise, should produce a TOC RSS [...]
By: 25 more Open Access (OA) Journals with TOC RSS feeds added to JournalTOCs, the free journal current awareness service « Roddy Macleod's Blog on December 12, 2011
at 9:12 am