Making Articles Systematically Discoverable for Researchers – JournalTOCs

Description of impact

JournalTOCs helps researchers to timely access ‘personalised’ new research by alerting them when new articles are published in their selected journals and, by providing them with full-text links when the articles are Open Access (OA).
These OA links were the result of JEMO, a technology developed by JournalTOCs in 2014 to resolve the problem of OA articles published in hybrid journals being erroneously kept behind pay-walls. Since 2015, JEMO has been adopted by over 20,000 scholarly journals and publishing platforms including Atypon. This has led to JournalTOCs being used extensively worldwide by multiple research centres, libraries and multinationals. JournalTOCs also works with over 3,770 scholarly publishers and its effect reaches 78 licensed research centres in 19 countries.

Narrative

Licensed research centres and libraries from hospitals, universities, governmental agencies, global organisations, banks as well as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies use JournalTOCs. They use JournalTOCs to discover critical research results for their researchers. The usefulness of JournalTOCs was enhanced when the results of the JEMO (2015) and MOOD projects were integrated within JournalTOCs, enabling it to provide users with full-text links for individual OA articles. JEMO has been adopted by over 20,000 scholarly journals and publishing platforms such as Atypon, leading to JournalTOCs now working with over 3,770 scholarly publishers and its effect reaches 78 licensed research centres in 19 countries.

Research-driven biopharmaceutical companies such as NovoNordisk Pharma, Roche and Ferring Pharmaceuticals as well as hospitals from the NHS, The Australian Health Service and the New Zealand Police are using JournalTOCs, thus saving considerable time and resources. The Information Resource Manager from Ferring Pharmaceuticals described how his company uses JournalTOCs, "The service is used as a one-stop-shop for signing up for TOC alerts. As knowledge workers in commercial organisations (based on R & D activities) we are in a combined situation of being extremely dependant on having exhaustive knowledge of new developments within our research field and having very little time to identify all relevant sources of information. A service that allows you to quickly and conveniently sign up for TOCs from any journal of potential relevance is a highly valuable tool."

The Knowledge & Information Coordinator (New Zealand Police Library) confirmed that, ”Having an institutional licence to JournalTOCS over the last five years…has enabled us to provide a one-stop-shop approach to providing table of contents alerting to all our subscribed journals. If we did not have an affordable product like JournalTOCs, it would be a logistical nightmare trying to provide a table of contents service to our customers”.

The European University Institute, Library describing the, “unified interface and the alerts’ service”...as…”particularly valuable”.

Over 70 companies and organisations bought licences for JournalTOCs Premium services and thousands of researchers and librarians use the free version of the technology every day. In addition, many research organisations from the UK, USA, France, Denmark, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Italy, Norway, Germany, Brazil and Spain, are accessing information tagged with JEMO elements through JournalTOCs web services (API) to integrate new research with OA identification in their own applications. In addition, important worldwide organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Library Network, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the European Commission are Premium partners of JournalTOCs.

The largest consortium was signed with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to provide premium access to new research, identified as Open Access or non-OA regardless of their provenance. The ISRO consortium includes 17 large aerospace research centres located in different parts of India (https://www.isro.gov.in/about-isro/isro-centres). The leading research centre of ISRO is the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). This consortium has been running since June 2017. Since the formation of the consortium JournalTOCs has been introduced to all libraries under ISRO. Currently 17 libraries are using this service and total number of users is about 8,000. In the VSSC library there are about 2,000 users and some of them following approximately 100 journals.

In addition, JournalTOCS established a partnership with the Quality Open Access Market (QOAM) service. QOAM was created by the CWTS (Centre for Science and Technology Studies) of Leiden University from The Netherlands. QOAM is a marketplace for scientific and scholarly journals which publish articles in Open Access. JournalTOCs has become critical to QOAM operation in matching author experiences with a journal against its publishing fees.

Impact status	Achieved
Impact date	1 Jan 2014 → 31 Dec 2020
Category of impact	Technological
Impact level	International