JATS - The Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite as a NISO standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012). JATS (also known as the NLM DTDs although they are available in DTD, XSD, and RNG forms) provides a common XML format for preserving the intellectual content of journal articles, independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. The Tag Suite consists of Tag Sets for Archiving, Publishing, and Authoring journal article content. These Tag Sets have been widely adopted by archives, libraries, and publishers, and are supported by many data conversion vendors and XML tools.
JATS’ publication as a NISO standard continues almost a decade-long endeavor. Since 2003, Mulberry has worked with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a center of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), to create and maintain the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite, the predecessor to JATS. In support of the NLM Tag Suite group, we at Mulberry have written and maintained the Tag Suite code including the DTDs, XSDs, and RNGs, and much of the Tag Suite documentation, in particular, all of the Tag Set Tag Libraries, which will continue to be hosted by NCBI. NISO JATS 1.0 is a fully backward-compatible revision of NLM version 3.0.
Mulberry provides consulting and support services to users of the Tag Sets, including publishers, archives, and content repackagers. We have:
- Created customizations and subsets of these Tag Sets;
- Designed and tuned workflows that include journals and books that use the Tag Sets;
- Provided QA for content converted into XML using one of the Tag Sets;
- Taught publisher personnel to read, use, and adapt the Tag Sets to their needs; and
- Created customized versions of Tag Set documentation for publishers which include the publisher’s in-house practices, exclude structures the publisher doesn’t use, and use the publisher’s content for all examples.
Mulberry has created a list of questions we are frequently asked about the JATS Tag Suite. See the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite Questions and Answers.
JATS-related Articles and Presentations
- The Proceedings of the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con), an annual conference on JATS and related tag sets, starting in 2010.
- A Non-backwards-compatible Update: A Difficult Decision
(a presentation about the decision with version 3.0 to optimize the then-NLM Tag Sets for future users, but not be backwards compatible with previous versions) - XML Essence Testing
- Report from the Field: PubMed Central, an XML-based Archive of Life Sciences Journal Articles
- Portico: A Case Study in the Use of XML for the Long-Term Preservation of Digital Artifacts
- Quality Control of PMC Content: A Case Study
- NISO Publishes Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standard
- NISO Z39.96 The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS): What Happened to the NLM DTDs?
- Coding practice of the Journal Article Tag Suite extensible markup language
Key JATS-related Resources
- ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015 JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite The site for the official JATS Standard
- NCBI’s Journal Article Tag Suite the site for JATS user documentation and resources
- NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag
Suite
(for information on prior versions of the Tag Suite) - NISO form for submitting comments on JATS. This is the place to suggest improvements to any of the JATS tag sets or the JATS Standard.
- JATS For Reuse "Optimising the reusability of content tagged with JATS XML"
- JATS-List — Open Forum on the Journal Article Tag Suite
- Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Wiki
- NCBI Software Collaboration (at GitHub).