Journal Article Tag Suite


The Journal Article Tag Suite is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization and approved by the American National Standards Institute with the code Z39.96-2012.
The NISO project was a continuation of the work done by NLM/NCBI, and popularized by the NLM's PubMed Central as a de facto standard for archiving and interchange of scientific open-access journals and its contents with XML.
With the NISO standardization the NLM initiative has gained a wider reach, and several other repositories, such as SciELO and Redalyc, adopted the XML formatting for scientific articles.
The JATS provides a set of XML elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles
as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.
JATS allows for descriptions of the full article content or just the article header metadata;
and allows other kinds of contents, including research and non-research articles, letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.

History

Since its introduction, NCBI's NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD suite has become the de facto standard for journal article markup in scholarly publishing. With the introduction of NISO JATS, it has been elevated to a true standard.
Even without public data interchange, the advantages of NISO JATS adoption affords publishers in terms of streamlining production workflows and optimizing system interoperability.

Timeline

; NLM JATS
; NISO JATS

Technical scope

By design, this is a model for journal articles, such as the typical research article found in an STM journal, and not a model for complete journals.

Tag sets

There are three tag sets:
; Journal Archiving and Interchange
; Journal Publishing
; Article Authoring
Document type definitions define each set and incorporate other standards such as MathML and XHTML Tables.

Document structure

JATS Publishing set defines a document that is a top-level component of a journal such as an article, a book or product review, or a letter to the editor. Each such document is composed of front matter and up to three optional parts. These must appear in the following order:
; Front matter
; Body
; Back matter
; Floating material
Following the front, body, back, and floating material, there may be either one or more responses to the article or one or more subordinate articles.

Example

This is the minimal article's structure,


PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS Journal Publishing DTD v1.0 20120330//EN"
"JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd"
xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
...
...
...


The DOCTYPE header is optional, a legacy from SGML and DTD-oriented validators. The dtd-version attribute can be used even without a DTD header.
The root element article is common for any version of JATS or "JATS family", as NLM DTDs. The rules for front, body and back tags validation, depends on the JATS version, but all versions have similar structure, with good compatibility in a range of years. The evolution of the schema preserves an overall stability.
Less common, "only front", "only front and back" variations are also used for other finalities than full-content representation. The general article composition is

Tools

There are a variety of tools for create, edit, convert and transform JATS.
They range from simple forms to complete conversion automation:

Conversion

;To JATS: Take as input a scientific document, and, with some human support, produce a JATS output.
;From JATS: Take JATS as input, produce another kind of document as output.
Tools that render JATS as HTML, usually on fly.
; Jatsdoc

JATS central repositories

As NISO JATS began the de facto and de juri standard for open access journals, the scientific community has adopted the JATS repositories as a kind of legal deposit, more valuable than the traditional digital libraries where only a PDF version is stored. Open knowledge need richer and structured formats as JATS: PDF and JATS must be certified as "same content", and the set "PDF+JATS" forming the unit of legal deposit.
List of JATS repositories and its contained:
These repositories do overlap and the same article can be held by more than one repository.

Alternatives and semantic

There are some effort and experiments using RDF conversion in the 2012, with no impact in the JATS community.

Later, in ~2016, for Semantic Web context, with SchemaOrg initiative, the class was defined, receiving better reception. It is an initial "JATS-like standardization" for RDF contexts of use.