NISO Publishes Updated Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standard 1.1

Baltimore, MD - January 7, 2016 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the formal publication of the updated version of JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite 1.1, ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015. This newly official edition is a revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012, also known as JATS 1.0, first published in July 2012. The purpose of JATS is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes that describes the content of metadata and journal articles using a common format that enables the exchange of journal content. This Tag Suite thus is intended to preserve intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which the content was originally delivered, and enables an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material. In addition, the JATS standard includes three implementations of the suite, called Tag Sets, which are intended to provide models for archiving, publishing, and authoring journal article content.

"JATS 1.1 continues to build on the success of JATS 1.0, which was itself the successor to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) DTD version 3.0, widely adopted in industry," comments Jeffrey Beck, NCBI Technical Information Specialist at the National Library of Medicine and Co-chair of the NISO JATS Standing Committee. "JATS is used to tag thousands of journals worldwide by a wide array of implementers and publishers. And JATS continues to grow," says Beck. "The TaxPub extension provides elements for tagging taxonomic treatments in journal articles. BITS is an NLM effort to make a JATS-based book model, and NISO STS is a NISO activity to make a JATS-based standard for Standards based on ISO STS."

"Comments from users made on JATS 1.0 through February 2015 have been addressed by the NISO JATS Standing Committee and incorporated into JATS 1.1. All changes are also backward compatible with JATS 1.0, which means that any document that was valid according to JATS 1.0 will be valid according to JATS 1.1," explains B. Tommie Usdin, President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc. and co-chair of the NISO JATS Standing Committee. "We are pleased that this formalization, performed via the ANSI/NISO consensus standardization process, enables adopters of JATS to trust that the enhancements added to JATS 1.1 are fully stable and will function as intended."

Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director of Programs, comments that, "JATS 1.0 was approved by ANSI and published by NISO in 2012. Since then, updates to the standard are managed through an ANSI-approved Continuous Maintenance procedure, which means that comments are reviewed and approved by a NISO JATS Standing Committee on a regular basis before the full updated standard is formalized." Lagace continues, "The Standing Committee evaluated feasibility and priority of all comments and created responses, which are now available via the NISO JATS web pages, so that any user can view the full history of these changes."

The NISO JATS 1.1 standard is available as both an online XML document and a freely available PDF from the NISO website at http://www.niso.org/workrooms/journalmarkup. Supporting documentation and schemas in DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C Schema formats are available at http://jats.nlm.nih.gov.

About NISO
NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website.