NISO Publishes Revised Journal Article Versions (JAV) Recommended Practice
Baltimore, Maryland, October 5, 2026: The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce the publication of the revised Journal Article Versions (JAV) Recommended Practice, NISO RP-8-2026.
First published in 2008 through a partnership between NISO and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the original JAV Recommended Practice gave the scholarly community a common vocabulary for the versions of a journal article that appear online before, during, and after formal publication. Since then, the growth of preprints, new publishing models, and post-publication updates has made it common for a single article to exist in many public versions. The revised Recommended Practice updates the terms and definitions for article versions, provides guidance on communicating version information in machine-readable formats such as JATS, and includes examples illustrating a range of real-world use cases.
Following a public comment period for the draft of the revised Recommended Practice, the JAV Revision Working Group reviewed and responded to all feedback received and incorporated it where appropriate into this final version.
"The scholarly record has become much more complex than a simple progression from manuscript to final article. Readers need to know whether a work has been reviewed, where it sits in the publication life cycle, and whether it has changed since. This revision gives the community a clearer way to communicate that context across different publishing models, and AI makes that clarity even more important," said Patrick Hargitt, Co-Founder and CEO, Olive Turn, and Co-Chair, JAV Revision Working Group.
"Libraries, repositories, and indexers all depend on version information that is both consistent and transparent," added Mike Nason, Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian, University of New Brunswick, and Co-Chair, JAV Revision Working Group. "This Recommended Practice was shaped by publishers, preprint server maintainers, repository managers, and other infrastructure providers working through a virtually bottomless collection of use cases, priorities, and preconceptions to find language that grants greater specificity not just for more traditional publishing models, but for emerging ones as well. It's my hope that this update to the JAV Recommended Practice will make it easier for users to follow a work through its life cycle with more flexibility and precision."
"Versioning touches nearly every part of the scholarly communication ecosystem, from the way authors share their work to the way readers find and cite it," said Cristin Hipke, NISO Standards Program Manager. "We're grateful to the members of the JAV Revision Working Group for the years of careful work behind this revision, and we encourage publishers, platforms, and libraries to review the updated recommendations and put them into practice."
The revised JAV Recommended Practice is freely available on the NISO website: https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/jav-revision.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with 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 life cycle of information standards. NISO is a nonprofit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.
