Monday 7 December 2009

JournalTOCs workshop & using alerts to populate your repository

On 20th November, I attended the JournalTOCs workshop.

I presented on the perspective of repository managers who might use the JournalTOCs tool, which offers a way for us to track what those at our institutions are publishing. In my work at Warwick, we've been using other alerting services, and I presented some statistics on how successful our use of the alerts has been.

You can see the presentation online at:
http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/API/blog/?p=123

There are lots of interesting potential uses for JournalTOCs, including a prompt for us to write to individual authors inviting deposits of their articles in our repositories. The API could even be used as a way to populate a repository or a CRIS with articles which are already recorded as being affiliated to a particular institution or by a particular author. However, institutional affiliations are not recorded in all publishers' data.

JournalTOCs' advantage over other alerting services for such a purpose is really that its data comes directly from the publishers, and so it is particularly prompt. Promptness is important when you're asking authors for early versions of their journal articles!

Other uses for JournalTOCs might be as a way for an institution to create a search tool which would search the tocs for journal titles which the institution subscribes to. Or even a tool to search the tocs of titles which are available on open access. Any institutional tool would want to incorporate that set as well as building their own subscription set.

Anyway, there are lots of potential uses for this very clever tool. For more information on JournalTOCs, please see follow my link to their blog!

Thursday 3 December 2009

Survey on Open Access & features of a repository

There's a survey at: http://www.dini.de/projekte/oa-statistik/english/

Which repository managers might be interested in completing or forwarding to their contacts to complete. It is quite a long survey, and I didn't find all the questions easy to understand. I think it's mostly aimed at scientists who are reading and writing articles, rather than repository managers themselves.

I blogged my personal perspective on the survey on my WRAP blog: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/entry/survey_on_open/