You are absolutely spot on about the backwardness of major publishers in terms of providing RSS feeds and/or email alerts of updates to tables of contents. Just tonight I have been toggling between PubMed, various publisher sites and Ovid–what a headache. Ugh.

It really is bizarre that the publisher of Computers in Libraries, Information Today, doesn’t seem to have RSS feeds of the TOC for that and of its other valuable publications. If it does, they are not readily discoverable on its web site:

http://www.infotoday.com/

Your best bet is Journal Alert in EBSCO. Way to go, EBSCO!

You might also try the journals database of PubMed. If you have a PubMed account (free, no strings attached) you can set up email alerts of dozens of journals—many of which are not strictly medical journals at all.

Also, you can set up email alerts of dozens of the Lippincott journals via this part of its site:

http://www.lwwonline.com/pt/re/lwwonline/home.htm;jsessionid=G19Hvy7xTCgJ3vZRpplhcxjL4Jtr9yBfBzCTTn1PwGctNP5SWr9Z!210985008!-949856144!8091!-1

It is slightly clunky and hard to find on the Lippincott site, but a few hours invested in setting up the alerts is well worth it, given that the alerts arrive with great regularity in one’s email inbox. (Some have come in as I been writing this note, for instance.)

The great laggard in the RSS TOC realm is (to no one’s surprise) Elsevier. I even wrote to Elsevier last week and was told that RSS feeds are not available yet (no rationale for this dismal state of affairs given). It seems to be Elsevier’s deliberate policy to retain its iron grip on its material, even to the extent of forcing current or potential subscribers to have to visit its very clunky web site every few months and crick through its dozens of offerings. No wonder librarians are getting ever more fed up with Elsevier.

Attention Elsevier stockholders: Elsevier is rapidly alienating most of the decision makers in the library world who rule on whether or not to subscribe to Elsevier journals. It is a basic service these days for publishers to offer RSS feeds of TOCs. It is not in the business interest of Elsevier to maintain such a blinkered, restrictive and ultimately self-defeating policy. Providing TOC information would garner subscribers and not result in leakage of its increasingly angry customer base—which is looking with an ever friendlier eye on the open access publishers like BioMed Central.

Finally, how I wish that the Library 2.0 crowd would cease some of its proselytizing and get together in a truly productive fashion with smart Web 2.0 types like Dave Winer, Marshall Kirkpatrick:

http://marshallk.com/

and Peter Cashmore:

http://mashable.com/

to somehow create some sort of OPML tool that would enable librarians to set up in blocks email alerts or RSS feeds of tables of contents of the many academic publishers. I would think that such thing is doable. I am no programmer, so maybe there are insurmountable obstacles at this point the creation of such a mashup. But it is absurd, saddening and infuriating that librarians throughout the world have to engage in the tedium of incrementally creating email alerts via a hodgepodge of not-for-profit and commercial databases and publisher web sites. Steven Cohen of Library stuff—could you lead the movement for the creation of some sort of central depot on the Internet for librarians to pop over to and set up RSS feeds of TOCs? The time is now. Hellllllp! We shouldn’t have to have to patch things together using FeedYes, Rmail and so forth.

Finally, the CiteULike listings appear not to be TOCs proper but merely listings of recent articles which, while helpful, are not TOCS as such.

Hope Leman