The commercial journal publishers provide sound RSS feeds by default, enabling complex services such as Journal TOCs. But there’s a distinct lack of RSS feeds from open access ejournals (even those using dedicated journal software) and other free ejournals. For instance, I did a quick RSS harvest of the Archaeology and Classical Civilisations sections in the JURN Directory, and came up with a pitifully small list of valid feeds…

http://www.ajaonline.org/rss.xml

http://arche.bymedia.net/arche.rss

http://www.archaeology.org/rss.xml

http://intarch.ac.uk/content.rdf

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://www.byzsym.org/index.php/bz/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/rss2

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/etruscan_studies/recent.rss

http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/rss/rssfeed.xml

http://nome.unak.is/nome2/feed.xml

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/rasenna/recent.rss

http://pompeiiana.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/classicsjournal/recent.rss

…so it hardly seems worth using something like rFeedfinder to harvest all the auto-discoverable RSS feeds for JURN’s Directory. The lack of feeds would appear to be one of the major failings of the online provision of free scholarly articles.