Comments on: RSS what a mess, publishers have made of it

By: Roddy MacLeod

Roddy MacLeod — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:18:01 +0000

This is one thing that the ticTOCs project http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ is looking at. We are hoping to come up with recommendations for publishers.

By: Hugo Besemer

Hugo Besemer — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:40:21 +0000

@wowter

I understand now that you were referring to the file extension that you wanted to harmonize when you said that everything should end with “feed” (rather than the XML itself) I would suggest to use a standard file extension “.xml”. It is less likely to cause trouble if a feed is opened in a browser than other file extensions like “.rss” of “.rdf” (sometimes used for rss 1.0)

By: wowter

wowter — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:59:43 +0000

@Matthew,
I do appreciate the way BMC is handeling this issue, but as a user, we face many publishers doing it all their own way. Journal abbreviations in most cases are not based on ISO standards, or any other standard, so that it is not going to help when you are dealing with 10,000 journals and some 1000 different publishers.

By: Matthew Cockerill

Matthew Cockerill — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:29:15 +0000

BioMed Central actually goes to significant lengths to use simple and logical URLs for its RSS feeds.

In all cases, the RSS feed URL is simply the journal home page URL, followed by /RSS/

We also use tag on each journal web page, to enable RSS feed autodiscovery.

In the case of the BMC-series of journals, the URL is based on the standard PubMed abbreviation:
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine
is abbreviated as
BMC Complement Altern Med
and so the home page is
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed/
and the RSS feed is
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed/rss/

A quick google for: BioMed Central OPML
finds:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/journals/biomedcentraljournallist.opml
a dynamic list of all our journal feeds in standard OPML format.

We also make our journal catalog data available as CSV and MARC.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/catalog

Hope this helps…

Matt

By: Matthew Cockerill

Matthew Cockerill — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:20:36 +0000

BioMed Central actually went to significant lengths to have a simple, predictable RSS URL format.

From any BioMed Central journal home page, simply add /rss to get the RSS feed.

Our BMC series journal URLs are based on the standard PubMed abbreviation of the journal, so:
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine
abbreviated as
BMC Complement Altern Med
has a URL of
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed/
and an RSS feed of
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmccomplementalternmed/rss/

We also use a tag to enable autodiscovery of the feed.

Also, a quick google of:
BioMed Central OPML

Will find you:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/ journals/biomedcentraljournallist.opml
A dynamic list of BioMed Central’s feeds in the standard OPML forward.

We also have CSV and MARC versions of this journal list available…

Regards,
Matt

By: wowter

wowter — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:36:06 +0000

@Kattebelletje
What you describe was what we intended to do. But since it is such a mess, that part of the project received a lower priority. So we still have to do it.

Wouter

By: kattebelletje

kattebelletje — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:38:29 +0000

This is the RSS structure for Cambridge journals: http://journals.cambridge.org/data/rss/feed__rss_2.0.xml . So your Experimental Botany’s RSS feed would be http://journals.cambridge.org/data/rss/feed_EAG_rss_2.0.xml (current issue).
For the Peace Palace Library we made the RSS feed for our TOC journals ourselves; for the other journals I have explored the RSS feed structure of Cambridge, Ingenta, Oxford and Sage. To make those feeds you need the journal’s journal key or journal abbreviation. All RSS feeds appear in our link resolver plinklet. The RSS feeds are indeed a big mess.

By: wowter

wowter — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:34:55 +0000

@Hugo
You are referring to the actual xml files which should comply to either RSS or Atom standards. My point however, is the mess of URL’s that publishers make of the URL pointing to the xml file. That should also be standardised, to make life less complicated.

By: Hugo Besemer

Hugo Besemer — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:40:47 +0000

My previous post does not make any sense as the Wordpress software of this blog seems to leave out all xml tags (and my post was about xml tags) If you want to learn more about what a mess the feed formats are suggest you go to (and now I am hoping it will allow me to paste n a link) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29

By: Aad Janson

Aad Janson — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 08:25:47 +0000

Like we did with our Table of Contents journals?

Three elements:
Base:
http://www.ppl.nl/rss/feeds/tocfeed.php

ISSN:
?issn=0041-9915

Title of journal:
&source=University%20of%20Pittsburgh%20Law%20Review

We added the title of the journal to provide readers with extra information. This information can be used instantly while presenting the journal in a recognizable way in your rss reader.