Consequently, hybrid journals are very important journals. According JournalTOCs statistics, they account for at least 30% of the total number of journals and it is likely that they will continue being an essential part of the scholarly publishing industry for years to come. This is particularly relevant if we consider that almost every hybrid journal is being indexed in at least one of the popular citation indexing services such as Scopus, Clarivate Analytics and CiteScore. While the number journals selected by JournalTOCs is not an exact representation of the whole scholarly journal landscape, its stats illustrated in the following image can give us a good idea of how the number of hybrid journals has steadily been increasing in the last five years.

 Figure 1: Last five years trend of the proportion of journals by publishing model.
(Source: JournalTOCs Aggregator Database. Values calculated each end of April of each year.)

This increased popularity has made it essential for services like JournalTOCs, which provide users with alerts for new issues from their favourite journals, to consider the need to identify OA articles within these hybrid journals. Not only will this make users aware of OA articles published together with subscription-based articles, but it also acknowledges how important OA articles are in the world of academic publishing.

To be able to programmatically pull OA articles from hybrid journals, it is necessary to find one identifying feature of OA articles that can be used across the board. Luckily for us, members of our JournalTOCs team led the search for this holy grail feature by the means of the Open JEMO project. The project identified that practically every hybrid journal was already using CC licenses in 2015. Currently, the Creative Commons (CC) license has become the de facto standard to identify the type of copyright license of OA articles. The conclusion of this project determined that the ‘cc:license tag’ could be used to set apart OA articles.

The cc:license tag is the main way to identify articles with a creative commons license which enables the free distribution of otherwise copyrighted work. In other words, this article is open access. At JournalTOCs, we already have the ability to indicate OA articles from hybrid journals right on the website if the cc:license tag is present in the RSS feeds of the current issue.

Figure 2: An example of how A&I Databases, Discovery Services and Aggregators can identify
OA articles in hybrid journals using the cc:license provided by the journal RSS feed.
(Source: JournalTOCs webpage for the ‘Acta Crystallographica Section D :
Biological Crystallography’ journal. Visited on 13 June 2018.)

Atypon steps in

One of a growing number of online publishing platforms that uses the cc:license tag to identify OA articles is Literatum, the online publishing platform of Atypon.

Atypon is following the lead of a handful of small but important publishers that were first to adopt the cc:license tag when identifying OA articles five years ago. Their number has been increasing steadily but Literatum is the first commercial publishing platform that has enabled full support for the cc:license in their RSS feeds following the JEMO guidelines. It is a commendable effort that should be emulated by every scholarly publisher and publishing platform. Similarly, OJS – the open source publishing platform – has enabled the use of the cc:license tag in their RSS feeds since approximately two years ago.

Atypon hosts a wide range of popular publishers, six of whom regularly use the cc:license tag in their RSS feeds and are, therefore, extremely useful for JournalTOCs.

These publishers are:

• American Society of Clinical Oncology. Apart from publishing successful journals and case reports which revolve around the study of oncology, it primarily acts as a professional organisation for physicians and oncology professionals who care for people with cancer. They are particularly involved in the realm of cancer research and the care of cancer patients. They publish three journals which represent a mixture of hybrid, open access and subscription formats. We are also lucky enough to be able to use them as a great example of cc:license tagging in action!

• FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology). This organisation promotes research and education in biological and biomedical sciences. They are the publisher of one hybrid journal: the well-known FASEB journal which focuses on transdisciplinary research covering all field of biological science.

• Wageningen Academic Publishers are an independent publishing house which focuses on life sciences. This includes animal and veterinary studies, nutrition and health, social and environmental studies and plant sciences. They currently publish seven journals which represent a mix of hybrid and subscription journals.

• Taylor & Francis is a leading publisher of scholarly journals, books/ebooks, text books in a wide range of fields. This includes the humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, science, technology and medicine sectors. T&F is already using the cc:license tag in over 900 of their journals.

• Physical Society of Japan. This publisher is one of the oldest academic societies for natural sciences in Japan and aim to bring the latest achievements and research in the study of physics to the forefront. They do this by regularly publishing two hybrid journals.
• Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht is a German publisher of academic literature and is one of the oldest independent publishing houses in the world. They primarily publish journals about history, the humanities, pedagogy and psychology and are responsible for a mix of subscription and hybrid journals.

By enabling publishers to use the cc:license tag to identify OA articles, Atypon is leading the change towards providing accurate information to library knowledgebase systems. This will, therefore, solve the issues affecting OA discovery and adding value to the publishing supply chain. We hope that other publishers, hosted on Atypon or elsewhere, will begin to see the benefits of using the cc:license in their APIs and RSS feeds and will choose to make OA articles even more accessible to eager readers.

Firstly, the maximum number of journals that free accounts can follow will now be 15 journals. This is a continuation of the blog post we made two years ago which can be viewed here. The reasons we outlined previously still apply now.

Furthermore, the maximum numbers of articles returned by the Articles-Search API (e.g. https://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/articles/corrosion+metals) for free accounts will be 25 articles per search. For anyone without an account, they will be able to continue using the API. However, their search results will be limited to 10 articles per search.

Finally, the Articles and the Journals APIs will only return results in XML (RSS) format.

These limits will not apply to Premium account holders who continue following up to 300 journals per user account, search for articles using the APIs without any limitations and receive search results either in XML (RSS) or JSON format. If you are interested in arranging a JournalTOCs Premium subscription for your institution, please get in touch with us at: journaltocs@hw.ac.uk.

Now that we’ve hit the halfway point of April and are longing for our summer holidays, the tendency of most people at this point in the year is to start running out of steam.

We are delighted to announce that we just reached over 30,000 journals in our database thanks to the newly introduced JSON feeds by Cambridge University Press which pushed us over the edge to reach our goal. This is an extremely exciting development for us and it allows us to provide you, our users, with even more content.

JSON Feeds were originally developed by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece who are prevalent figures in the Apple community. For those of you who don’t know, JSON feeds are essentially the easier-to-read, less-buggy big brother to RSS and Atom feeds. They all follow a similar format but JSON feeds provide a more efficient way to accomplish the same tasks.

They are found everywhere these days from apps to websites such as Facebook. JSON has quickly become a developer’s favourite to use when developing API, so it’s no surprise that the websites of publishers of scholarly journals have started using this format. For us, Cambridge University Press’s decision to push JSON feeds is a huge step forward in content consumption. We expect that other journals follow in their footsteps.

JSON feeds also represent the opportunity to reverse the decreasing popularity of RSS feeds. JournalTOCs is extremely reliant on RSS feeds to bring you daily content but a few journals are now deciding not to offer them. Through the increasing prevalence of JSON feeds, we have an opportunity here to bring feed content back into the mainstream. JSON could be a good alternative for those publishers who are hesitant to implement RSS feeds for their journals. After all, JSON feeds are easy to create and use and do not rely on a third party platform while allowing the users to have more freedom and access to the content they want to follow.

More than anything, JSON feeds represent an additional source of content for JournalTOCs and will allow us to crack on with our important work by providing a more efficient route for us to take.

Keep your eyes peeled for other exciting JournalTOCs news on the horizon that we’re very eager to share with you all.

A month ago, the world suffered a global cyberattack named by the international press as the ‘biggest ransomware’ offensive in history. Although the attack used a technique known as phishing (hackers spread a “ransomware” called WannaCry tricking email users into opening attachments and releasing malware onto their system) companies and organisations implemented every security measure available to them. One of those most common measures implemented by many journal publishers was to switch every webpage from HTTP to HTTPS (secure protocol) in order to encrypt and transport their content safely over the net.

While using https for every webpage, including pages that do not contain sensitive information, could seem to be an exaggerated and disputable measure, it is one of the quickest and efficient ways to protect a website. However, this measure has produced an unintended effect in the case of the RSS feeds used by journals to announce their new content: As a result of all these URLs changing, people who have manually added the previous URLs to feed readers are finding that those feeds are now out of date and are not providing the latest Tables of Contents. Even in the popular RSS reader services such as Netvibes, the previous feed URLs are not working.

It is up to individuals if they wish to load RSS feeds into their own readers, but in doing so, if the URL changes, individuals will then need to manually update the feeds in question. The benefit of using an aggregation service such as JournalTOCs is that we constantly maintain our database of feeds to ensure that we link only to the latest ones and that the content displayed in JournalTOCs is up-to-date. In the past couple of weeks we have updated thousands of feeds, using manual and automated methods, and this work continues. In essence, JournalTOCs does the work so that you don’t have to.

One year ago (21st March 2014 to be exact) we contacted Helen Duce, the Head of E-Publishing at Maney Publishing, because after Maney migrated to its new Atypon’s e-publishing platform (Literatum), JournalTOCs was unable to crawl the TOC RSS feeds of Maney’s journals.

JournalTOCS not only uses the effective and simple RSS feeds to get the latest articles from over 25,000 journals. It also uses a very basic version of the simple, but still effective, wget unix command:

wget -O newtocs.tmp "journal-RSS-feed-URL" 2>&1

That is it. A wget that has nothing to hide or try to use its rich options to force crawling.

As we can only communicate with the publishers, we couldn’t discuss the problem directly with Atypon. So, we contacted Maney many times. While Helen was very helpful, Atypon was telling Maney that everything was OK at their end, but we knew that we were being refused access to the RSS feeds.

Today, Helen gave us the good news that Maney have finally heard back from Atypon on this issue. It turns out that our IP range was blocked by Maney Online (Atypon) because of “abuse monitoring“, given that JournalsTOCs was crawling content (RSS feeds) which Atypon flagged up as abuse.

Fortunately the misunderstanding has been resolved. Atypon has noticed that crawling RSS feeds is not abuse. The very reason for having RSS feeds is to enable other services to crawl and reuse your feeds to facilitate the widest dissemination of your content, which at the end of the day will benefit your business because it would increase the number of visitors to your site.

We are glad to be able to access the RSS feeds of Maney again. We will restore the Maney journals that were selected by the JournalTOCs Index and start to update their TOCs. In the last year, usage (number of followers) for Maney’s journals have decreased at JournalTOCs, but we hope that once users see that Maney’s journals are being updated, they will start to follow Maney journals again.

Publishers that are changing platforms should make sure to check that their RSS feeds continue being accessible for aggregators and discovery services. By working together, publishers, discovery services, aggregators and e-publishing platforms, can create positive impact in facilitating the dissemination of research.

“the success of these systems [link resolvers and knowledgebases] and services is ultimately dependent upon the cooperation of the various players across the supply chain of electronic resource metadata”
(van Ballegooie, Marlene (2015) Knowledgebases: The Cornerstone of E-Resource Management and Access. Serials Review 40(4) pp. 259-266. DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2014.977127)

(Update: Three months after this blog post was published,  OA Publishing London removed the NOINDEX meta-tag from their RSS feeds. Now, all the journals currently being published online by OA Publishing London have been restored in JournalTOCs.)

Last week, JournalTOCs stopped indexing all of the 40 journals published by OA Publishing London because this publisher took the unusual and illogical measure of requesting aggregators not to index (aggregate) the RSS feeds for the current issues of its journals. Tables of Contents from the OA Publishing London journals will no longer be updated at JournalTOCs. Those who have been following any of the 40 journals will not be able to keep up with new issues.

Why would OA Publishing London want to stop aggregators and search engines from crawling and collecting its RSS feeds? Years ago, it might just have made some sense using the noindex meta-tag for RSS feeds, but nowadays there is no need to noindex such feeds. Google and the rest of modern search engines can easily identify RSS feeds and they act on that by not including RSS feeds in web search results.

Publishers should, in reality, very much want their RSS feeds to be indexed, because it can help aggregators and search engines to direct users to where the newest content is. Search engines are smart enough to understand the difference between a feed and webpage, and use the feed as a pointer to the webpage where the real source of the content resides. Allowing search engines to index RSS feeds is therefore an important way to drive traffic to the webpages of the actual content.

There is no scenario in which a publisher is not interested in having their latest content indexed. Old feeds generators, such as the deprecated Feedburner, still provide users with the outdated option to noindex feeds to prevent them from being penalized by search engines. Publishers need to be reassured that that it is no longer an issue, and indexed feeds do not create penalty situations. Google itself will normally not show RSS feeds in search results.

The noindex meta-tag is not good for publishers. Any publisher who wants to enable RSS readers, aggregators and APIs to reuse details of their content should make sure to remove the noindex meta-tag from their RSS pages and from their software that generates RSS feeds.

The noindex meta-tag to be removed looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex“>

This code tells search engines and aggregators that they should not index or crawl the content of the RSS feeds.

So, if you want the abstracts of your latest publications to be indexed by JournalTOCs, search engine, aggregator or any web service, and thus ensure that hundreds of thousands of potential readers can discover your content, you should make sure you ARE NOT using the noindex meta-tag.

The noindex meta-tag can help in search engine optimization (SOA) but it should be used wisely, rather than simply assuming that it’s always a good idea to use it. noindex should only be used for web pages you don’t want showing up in search results or want to hide from the external world. For example a test page, archive page, or something similar that is not relevant for the publisher’s business; these should have the noindex tag, so that they don’t end up taking the place of the real important pages in search results (Google’s algorithm tends to avoid placing multiple links from the same domain on the front page (unless the website has a good ranking)).

For optimal crawling, Google recommends using also RSS/Atom feeds

RSS pages (feeds) are not only relevant pages; they are used by the search engines and aggregators to redirect users to your relevant webpages! They help to market your real content. They are good for everyone, including readers, authors, end users and for your business.

Since this year JournalTOCs has started to move on to a crowdsourcing model to maintain its growing database of journals.

Reaching the 24,000 journals milestone was the turning point. This number practically represents the bulk of relevant journals that have been selected and added by the selection team of JournalTOCs. In May we recognized that the selection process would greatly benefit from the contributions from professionals interested in having all the relevant journals in JournalTOCs.

The decision of using crowdsourcing was mainly based on two facts:

1. Our small selection team cannot cope with the hundreds of requests we receive every day, most of them from relatively new Open Access (OA) publishers, asking us to add their journals to JournalTOCs. Very few of those journals pass the selection process.
2. We had a growing number of talented and enthusiastic users, principally professional academic librarians, who have been helping us with the discovery and evaluation of new journals. Almost all the journals suggested by those users have passed the selection criteria.

Crowdselection works for JournalTOCs because the selection process relies upon the knowledge and requirements of those who actually need to use or provide access for the missing journals. In some way our approach is inspired in a crowdsourcing strategy used in the investment market, where the average price produced by ‘grey markets’ have demonstrated to be more accurate than the predictions made by the experts.

For example: Grey markets ran last year on both the Royal Mail and Twitter IPOs were more accurate in predicting prices than bankers and their advisers. On the Twitter IPO, the grey market predicted shares at the end of first day of trading would be worth $44. They actually ended up at $45.06 – incredibly close, particularly when you consider the price set the “expert” bankers was $26.

It was natural then to provide our valued users with the means to add and edit journals. Without realizing we started to use crowdsourcing to expand and update JournalTOCs. Thus gradually, crowdselection is effectively accomplishing the selection process that was once the province of the specialized team. The initial results are very encouraging.

Adding new journals and updating journals involves very few simple steps. The user counts with tools to first verify that both the publisher and the journals are not already registered with JournalTOCs. After this, the journal, and if necessary, the publisher too, can be added to the database. Crowdselection only adds journals that meet the following Selection Criteria:

• The journal is a scientific or academic journal that publishes peer-reviewed research papers.
• The journal must have an editor, an editorial board and a verifiable peer-review system in place.
• The journal must publish TOC RSS feeds for its most recent issues.
• The journal can be a magazine provided that it has a proven record of publishing only technical and professional reviewed material that is relevant to industry, government and research (e.g. Harvard Business Review Magazine)
• The journal is an active journal that has published different issues in this year and the previous year. Brand new journals with only one issue published cannot be added to JournalTOCs. In particular we are carefully with new Open Access journals published by dubious houses.

Crowdselection includes an automated system that verifies new journals and the user who has created the journal is contacted if we notice that further guidance is needed.

A positive consequence of using crowdsourcing to maintain the entire database would be the possibility of making all the features of JournalTOCS Premium, that do not require institutional customisation, freely available to anyone, starting with the users that have helped to maintain the database of journals.

https://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/journals/0143-3369?output=articles&user=super.journaltocs@gmail.com

The above call will grab the feeds produced and normalized by JournalTOCs for the journal with ISSN 0143-3369. You must provide the email address you have used to register with JournalTOCs as the value for the parameter “user”.

By default the links of the individual articles are the original links provided by the publisher or the OpenURL links created with your institutional OpenURL if found available. But, if you want that those links include your ezProxy, you need to use a Premium account. In this case, you or your Account Administrator need to go to your “Service Configuration” window and select the “Accounts” tab and find the “Links to use for the articles returned by the API” section. In this section tick the “Append the Institutional ezProxy” option and hit “Save”. Now your RSS feeds will include your proxy-server string in the URLs that go to individual articles (the <link> element in the RSS feeds (please use browser’s “View Page Source” to view the RSS content)

This is a highly important development in the efforts being made towards enabling systematic and easy identification of Open Access articles for aggregators, discovery services and A&I providers.

Publishers start to enable the systematic identification of Open Access at the Article Level

These first results are the product of collaboration between JournalTOCs and more than 10 established commercial forward thinking publishers.

Being able to systematically and consistently identify Open Access articles, regardless where they have been published, has a huge potential for the progress of Open Access and could play a vital role in the success of using the hybrid model to migrate subscription-based titles to full Open Access in a sustainable way for authors, readers, librarians and publishers.

The technology behind this new service is the simple and easy to use TOC RSS feeds. RSS feeds are also relatively easy to implement.

A publisher wanting to support the automated discovery of Open Access from its journals only needs to create its RSS feeds by following these best practices and these steps.

Example showing how an OA article from a hybrid journal is identified by JournalTOCs:

https://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=search&query=1740-0597

At this stage the OA articles are only identified as such by the OA logo and an orange background. As more publishers implement the <cc:license> and <dc:rights> standard elements in their RSS feeds, we will be able to provide information on the type of CC licence and the copyright holder for each OA article. The information will be obtained by combining the possible implementations of the <cc:license> and <dc:rights> elements: