Welcome to the journalTOCsAPI Project Blog

The journalTOCsAPI Project is creating a facility for monitoring current journal issues to identify published papers for IRs

• Project Tag: JOURNALTOCSAPI
• Project Team: Roger Rist; Santy Chumbe; Lisa Rogers
• Project Friends: Jenny Delasalle; Phil Barker; Roddy MacLeod
• Project details on JISC PIMS: https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1390

In short, the project is developing a prototype to solve or alleviate two use cases

1.1. First Use Case: Looking for new published papers

An IR manager needs to gather articles for the IR as these articles are published

Current scenario:
IR Manager attempts to capture articles that have been published by their academics by using a combination of e-journal TOC and A&I services (e.g. Zetoc, Scopus, Thomson WoS.) None of these services fulfill all of the IR managers’ needs, as they do not cover all publications and most of them have subscription barriers that may be problematic for IR managers. In the case of Zetoc, its alerting service is unable to completely solve the problem because it cannot identify with exactitude a specific author. In addition, much Zetoc metadata is maintained manually and for that reason is sometimes out of date. Setting up and maintaining a Zetoc alerting service is time consuming for the IR manager

Proposed scenario:
IR Managers are provided with an API to identify articles that have been published by their academics. IR manager setups and sends an “alerting” request (“search by author and affiliation”) to the JournalTOCs API. The API uses a look-up tool to monitor new journal issues by matching the “alerting” request against the ticTOCs RSS directory.  The API alerts IR managers when published papers are identified by the matching.

1.2. Second Use Case: Alerting when deposited papers have been published

IR manager needs to be alerted when deposited “submitted” articles have been published in scholarly journals.

Current scenario:
IR Manager uses “versions” to keep track of the status of papers already deposited in her IR. In many instances, authors are being encouraged to deposit their works as soon as they have submitted their papers to commercial publishers. Those papers are identified by the IR manager as “submitted” versions of the work, until they are published, when they should be tagged as “published”, with the relevant citation added to the metadata (including DOI if available).  IR manager uses time consuming procedures to identify “submitted” articles that have been subsequently published in scholarly journals. Practice has demonstrated that the IR Manager cannot rely on the author for completing this information, and very manual procedures are currently being used by IR Managers to solve this issue.

Proposed scenario:
IR Managers are provided with an API to alert them when items submitted to their IRs are subsequently published elsewhere, in scholarly journals. A requirement for using the API is that the IR have to have an RSS feed of newly added items.
Periodically the API harvests RSS feeds from IR
The API’s look-up tool matches the harvested IR RSS feeds against the ticTOCs RSS directory
API alerts IR managers of the published papers identified by the matching

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