ticTOCs in a nutshellThe aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journalcurrent awareness by making it easy for academics to find, display, store, combineand reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web-basedenvironment.Scholarly Journal publishing is a $5billion per year industry, and around25,000 peer-reviewed journals are currently being published. More than 60% of these are now published online. There are about 120,000 journals (peer and non-peer reviewed) being published in total, by a few hundred publishers (commercial,non-commercial, Open Access, university press, and so on).There are 200,000 researchers in the UK, and 5.5 million globally, for whom thispublished content may be relevant.The latest issues of these journals might be seen as the cream on the cake, in thatthey contain the results of the latest research.At the present time, the contents of latest issues are ‘discovered’ in various ways.This is known as journal Current Awareness. None of the existing discovery methodsis particularly efficient, and this whole area is ripe for R&D.Current discovery methods include:1. Physically browsing current issues or table of contents photocopies. This suitssome users, but is declining as the importance of print journals declines.2. Browsing latest issues online via publishers’ websites, or aggregator websites.This suits some users, but can be time consuming, and not efficient.3. email Table of Contents alerts. These are very popular. This method suits someusers. There are various problems however – for example, there are numerousservices, services sometimes change, publishers change, titles move, extra-registrations and passwords may be necessary, re-registration may be necessary,users move – therefore there are administrative overheads involved in using emailtable of contents services. Some people report being “haunted by alerts” and “self-inflicted spam”.4. RSS feeds of TOCs. In March 2005 there were 1,139 journal TOC RSS feedsavailable from 13 publishers, and by October 2006 this had risen to 7,042 feeds from38 publishers. In addition, there are third party feeds from services such as Zetocand Ingenta. Today, therefore, there are metadata syndication possibilities for TOCs.The way it works just now suits some people, however it requires someunderstanding of the concepts, and can be confusing. There are various publisher websites and feeds and aggregator feeds, various desktop readers and web-basedreaders, and various confusing icons.