NISO RP-8-2026, Journal Article Versions (JAV)

This NISO Journal Article Versions (JAV) Recommended Practice revision provides a reliable and consistent way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that typically appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication.

In November 2020, the NISO Voting Members approved a ballot to revisit the 2008 recommendations. Given the rapidly changing nature of the scholarly publishing landscape, there was an expressed need to both widen the scope of participants to better represent an expansion in stakeholders, platforms, processes, and stewardship of academic publishing, and to modify recommendations with the following specific goals:

• Define a set of terms that describe versions of content published, so a user knows at what stage of the process this content is, including the level of review, publisher input, and updating—its provenance.
• Recommend how identifiers should be assigned to each version and how to ensure indexers collect citations to each version as a whole, while the versions remain able to be cited independently.
• Review relationships between JAV and associated tools such as the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) and machine-readable cataloging (MARC).
• Revisit and clarify nomenclature and definitions of the JAV elements and stakeholders/entities and address and rectify any disagreement around any JAV element or definition, in order to encourage broader adoption by STM publishers and service providers.

Previous version: NISO RP-8-2008