JATS – Journal Article Tag Suite, is an international standard XML tag set for journal articles, formally known as NSI/NISO standard for the XML interchange of journal articles, JATS is defined as a set of XML components and attributes that can be utilized to mark the structure and semantics of a single journal article, so every article in a journal has its own JATS file, therefore JATS does not replicate issues of journals or another document, At first, JATS was used only for STEM – Scientific, Technical, Engineering, and Medical articles, however, it is being adopted now for the humanities, sociology, economics, and the sciences journals as well.
There are three JATS models that target three distinct groups in the publication life cycle.
- Journal Article Publishing Model (used by publishers, hosting platforms, and portals)
- Article Authoring Model (designed for the article authors)
- Archiving and Interchange Model (libraries and archives to consume XML into their repositories)
JATS was first launched in 2003, and the purpose was to exchanging journal articles, and providing interoperability of article content and article metadata between publisher and archives was meant to provide, So, essentially only Archiving and Interchange Model was in use, it was anticipated that publishers, hosters, portals, and archives would use their own XML tag set internally, and convert the article to JATS XML.
Key benefits of JATS XML for publishers
As we all know JATS XML is standard for Journal content and broadly used by scholarly communities, publishers, archives, indexes, hosters, and vendors. Though few large publishers still use their own XML tag set, they too model their articles to JATS XML for interchange and make crossref deposit files.
In more than 25 countries worldwide, which includes countries like Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, many public and private archives (PubMed Central (US and UK), British National Library, Australian National Library, US Library of Congress, Portico/ITHAKA/JSTOR, etc.
- Production advantages for publishers as JATS are declarative and semantic in nature and not behavioral like HTML, hence articles are simpler to process.
- Increase Readership, Citations, and Impact Factor – are searchable and machine-readable, which means when a publisher publishes its article as JATS, it will be easily accessed, read, and indexed by search engines like Google Scholar, Bing, Google, etc.
- Extensive metadata support – are capable to store rich, extensive metadata with each article, which means your metadata travels wherever you publish your article, this is a great way for data mining and context-based searchability.
Metadata Supported By JATS XML:
- Article level Metadata – Data about articles like Title, DOI, Publisher Identifiers, Copyrights, arXiv numbers, Institution and funder Identifier, Keyword, Multiple Abstract, info about research funding, Resource Links, etc.
- Contributors – Contributors of an article are not just limited to authors and editors, It includes photographers, study designers, curators, genome sequencers, specimen collectors, visualization artists, JATS can capture unique external identifiers for contributors, their names, alternative names, roles, and affiliations.
- Bibliographic references – can store detailed bibliographic metadata and supports almost all types and styles of reference tagging and has specific elements for citations which include the title of article and journal, issue number, contributor names, publication date, DOI, etc.
How To Convert into JATS XML
let’s have a look at how publishers convert documents to JATS XML for publication
The structure of the JATS XML article:
- Front Matter (<front>)
- Journal level metadata (journal-title and identifiers)
- Article level metadata (article title, author(s), identifiers like a DOI)
Body Matter (<body>) the narrative text of the article, including, for example:
- Paragraphs
- Sections
- Figures and Graphics
- Tables (XHTML and CALS)
- Equations and Quotations
