This guest post is by Aradhana Mistry, Publishing Systems Coordinator, BMJ
The majority of publishers who produce full-text online journal articles produce their content in XML, a language that allows encoding of documents in a human- and machine-readable format. The XML format used is usually the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), which is a standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and this can then drive the generation of typeset PDFs, the HTML view and deliveries of content and metadata elsewhere, for example, to register DOIs at Crossref and send content to indexing services.
The JATS Standard is purposefully flexible to increase adoption by publishers across the board – they can tag their journal content however works best for them. However, this flexibility makes it difficult for anyone trying to use XML from different publishers because the same thing is often done a number of different ways! The JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) group has focused on bringing together the community by publishing recommendations for standardised JATS tagging since 2014; in 2015, we wrote a blog post on the OASPA forum about JATS4R.
Since we last updated you, a lot has happened!
In December 2018, JATS4R became a NISO recommended practice working group, and since then new and updated recommendations have been published as NISO Recommended Practices, complete with DOI and ISSN. As open access increases in importance in the publishing world, so too JATS4R recommendations have become increasingly useful in the translation of this openness in the content tagging.
Since 2018, we’ve been busy publishing some key recommendations and updating others:
- The preprint citation recommendation highlights best practices to ensure that preprints are consistently tagged as such when cited, which has become critical in the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Peer review materials is a comprehensive recommendation that was in development for over a year with input from a wide range of players in the field. It helps ensure that peer review materials can easily be surfaced across content as we move to a more open peer review atmosphere. As this area evolves, we expect the recommendation to be revised in order to remain an up-to-date source for the community.
- Data citations recommendation was updated to reflect needs that came out of the Data Availability Statements recommendation.
- The Funding and CRediT taxonomy recommendations were both updated as a result of feedback from the community.
- A software citations subgroup has been launched and will start work imminently.
There are now 17 JATS4R recommendations, and we hope to keep adding more… but we need help!
Towards the end of 2020, JATS4R relaunched our website, along with a new roadmap area where the community can directly have their say. Here publishers can feed into the prioritisation of recommendations and make suggestions for new ones. We also encourage people to make comments on the individual recommendations pages to give positive feedback or points for revision. There are always different perspectives to be considered, and JATS4R is keen to take everyone’s comments on board.
We’d love to hear from members of OASPA who would like to get involved, whether that be through a comment or upvote on the roadmap on our website or wanting to get involved in a subgroup. Please contact us at info@jats4r.org.
