scope:

The Journal Article Tag Suite defines elements and attributes that describe metadata and full content of scholarly journal articles. The Suite is not designed to describe magazines, books, or other publishing formats. While some structures in these formats may be similar to structures in journal articles, other structures may be distinctly different and may not be handled by existing elements and attributes defined in the Tag Suite.

The Tag Suite is the complete set of elements and attributes described in the standard. Along with these descriptions, the standard includes three article models or Tag Sets:

• The Journal Archive and Interchange Tag Set

• The Journal Publishing Tag Set

• The Article Authoring Tag Set

The Tag Suite has been designed to be extensible. Any of the tag sets may be extended or restricted to meet the needs of a given project. A new tag set that is a subset of one of the tag sets described in the Standard should be considered "conforming" to the standard. By definition, documents valid to such a conforming subset would also be valid according to the JATS model that the subset is based on.

New tag sets may be built from the elements and attributes in the Tag Suite. Tag sets that add structures (elements and/or attributes) to those defined in the standard (leading to documents not valid according to one of the models in the standard) should be called "based on JATS". Such tag sets are not considered "conforming" to the standard. Similarly, tag sets that extend or loosen the models described in the standard, such that documents valid to these new tag sets may not be valid according to one of the models in the standard, should be called "based on JATS". Such tag sets are also not considered "conforming" to the standard.

There are a number of items that have not been included in this standard:

1. Schemas that represent the three Tag Sets - The schemas (available in DTD, W3C Schema, and RELAX NG syntax) are included in the non-normative supporting information and can be found on the JATS site at the National Library of Medicine

2. Detailed Usage Information - The NLM DTDs were supported by extensive usage information in the Tag Libraries. These Tag Libraries are still being produced to support the three NISO JATS tag sets.

3. Tagging examples are included in the three Tag Libraries listed above.

4. Details concerning MathML elements and OASIS XML Exchange table elements (based on the CALS table elements) are described in other standards. Specific instructions for using these elements should be gotten from the original standards referenced in Section 5, References. The default table model for the NISO JATS Tag Suite is based on, and designed to be converted easily to, the XHTML 1.1 table model. Details for the elements and attributes in the XHTML-inspired NISO JATS tables are provided in the individual Tag Set Tag Library documentation.

Purpose

The purpose of the NISO Journal Article Tag Suite (NISO JATS) standard is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes that describes the content and metadata of journal articles-including research and non-research articles, letters, editorials, book and product reviews-with the intent of providing a common format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content.

The intent of the Tag Suite is to preserve the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. The Tag Suite enables an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material without modeling any particular sequence or textual format.

This standard also includes three implementations of the suite, called "Tag Sets". These tag sets are built from the elements and attributes defined in the Suite and are intended to provide models for archiving, publishing, and authoring journal article content.