A new scholarly journals tables of contents (TOCs) service called ticTOCs - Journal Tables of Contents Service (http://www.tictocs.ac.uk) has been launched to keep users abreast with scholarly literature. ticTOCs, funded under the JISC Users & Innovations programme, has been developed by an international consortium led by the University of Liverpool Library. The other consortium members include 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.
ticTOCs provides free access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It seeks to help scholars, researchers and academics keep up-to-date with what is being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject. Using ticTOCs, users can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher; view the latest TOC; link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or open access, allow); and save selected journals to MyTOCs to view future TOCs. ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines. In addition, users can import article citations into RefWorks, where institutional or personal subscriptions allow.
Behind the scenes, the ticTOCs service aggregates TOC RSS feeds produced by journal publishers. The content of the TOCs displayed within ticTOCs is dependent on the information contained in the publishers' RSS feeds. RSS feeds exported via ticTOCs are the publishers' own feeds. Links to articles are to either the full text, or landing pages, on publishers' websites. Content includes journals from Elsevier, Springer-verlag, John Wiley and Sons, Informa (Taylor and Francis), Sage Publications, Sabinet Online, Oxford University Press, Inderscience Publishers, Cambridge University Press, Biomed Central, Wolters Kluwer, Emerald, IEEE, Revues, Nature Publishing Group, Hindawi, Institute of Physics, and over 400 other publishers.
A ticTOCs Project subgroup, led by Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef, will publish recommendations for best practice covering the information that publishers should include in journal TOC RSS feeds, and the best way to structure that information. This is expected to improve the quality of data and facilitate interoperability for anyone, or any service that uses TOC RSS feeds. The recommendations will appear on the ticTOCs website when available, and will also be publicised elsewhere.
