*ticTOCs Project to transform journal current awareness*

Website: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/
Blog: http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/

ticTOCs is a project to develop a freely available service which will
transform journal current awareness. The ticTOCs service will make it easy
for academics, researchers and anyone else to find, display, store, combine
and reuse journal tables of contents (TOCs) from multiple publishers in a
personalisable web based environment. JISC is the primary funder of the
ticTOCs project, which will run for two years from April 2007.

Fifteen partners are involved in the project. Lead by the University of
Liverpool Library, the consortium also includes Heriot-Watt University,
Cranfield University, CrossRef, ProQuest, RefWorks, Emerald, Nature
Publishing Group, SAGE Publishers, Institute of Physics, Inderscience
Publishers, MIMAS, Directory of Open Access Journals, Open J-Gate and
Intute.

Efficient journal current awareness services are of the highest importance
to researchers and academics, whatever their discipline. Ensuring efficient
and easy access to the contents of the latest journal publications is also
important for publishers of scholarly journals, a business which is
estimated to be worth $5 billion per annum. Authors of articles in scholarly
publications also want their output to be available to as wide an audience
as possible, as soon after publication as possible.

The ticTOCs project will develop a freely available service which will
benefit not only academics and researchers, publishers and authors, but also
service providers such as libraries, aggregators, discovery services and
journal directories. As such, ticTOCs is likely to become an important
component of the scholarly communications process.

The ticTOCS service will enable academics, researchers and anyone else,
without having to understand the technical or procedural concepts involved
in the process, to discover, subscribe to, search within, be alerted to,
aggregate, export and re-use standardised Table of Contents RSS (really
Simple Syndication) feeds and their content for thousands of journals from
numerous publishers. In addition, it will facilitate the re-use of
aggregated journal TOC content on a subject basis by gateways, subject-based
resource discovery services, library services and others, where it can act
as a showcase of the latest research output. It will also make it easy for
users of library and information services, commercial and open access
journal publishers, online gateways, content aggregators and journal
directories to subscribe to journal TOC RSS feeds of interest, with one
click, via a freely available personalisable web-based interface. ticTOCs
will encourage the production of standardised journal TOC RSS feeds, and
thereby facilitate their interoperability and improve the quality of their
data.

Terry Bucknell, ticTOCs Project Leader, said : "Liverpool University is
delighted to be leading this significant development in journal current
awareness. ticTOCS will demonstrate how the innovative application of simple
technologies enables the easy delivery of valuable services that previously
required considerable effort."

A prototype service is expected to be up and running by April 2008.

The project has been named ticTOCs because part of the service will involve
the ticking of selected TOCs (Tables of Contents) of interest, from an easy
to use online directory of thousands of feeds.

More information about ticTOCs is available at the project website:
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/   A ticTOCs news blog is also available at:
http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/

Contact: Joe Hilton, ticTOCs Project Manager, Sydney Jones Library,
University of Liverpool, Chatham St, PO Box 123 Liverpool, United Kingdom,
L69 3DA.
Email: jo555@liverpool.ac.uk