One of the goals of open access is to enable the unimpeded reuse of scholarly literature so that new tools and services can be built around the text. This will help all interested readers to navigate, interrogate and find the material that’s most relevant to them. To support that goal, content doesn’t just have to be accessible, it also has to be structured correctly and consistently.
Melissa Harrison, Head of Production Operations at eLife, is involved in a collaborative project aiming to make progress in this area and provides more details below.
The XML DTDs developed by the National Library of Medicine have become an important standard used by many publishers, but even though many use the same DTDs they don’t implement them in the same way. It’s in the interests of all Open-Access publishers in particular to agree on some consistent approaches.
The latest incarnation of the NLM DTD, the NISO Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), is deliberately loose in order to allow publishers to tag content with many variant requirements. This flexibility is an important feature of JATS and encourages broad adoption. However, for those parts of an article where flexibility isn’t so important, it would be very beneficial to establish some recommendations as to how certain elements should be tagged. That will help us to support text and data mining and other reuses of content.
The JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) working group (http://jats4r.org/) was set up in June 2014 following a call to action at JATSCon in April of that year (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK159730/).
The remit of the group is to produce recommendations and tools to reduce the ambiguity and divergence across publishers and producers of content in JATS XML format. The group has initially focussed on 2 areas: Permissions and Math. Information is available on all of the topics being worked on by the group.
The group has also built tools for publishers to test their compliance with the recommendations.
In December 2014 / January 2015, the group was expanded to include further interested parties. The group is taking an open approach and welcomes additional contributions from anyone. We want to ensure that recommendations are accessible and applicable to the greatest possible number of producers of this format of XML.
The group meets biweekly via a conference call and communicates mainly via open GitHub issues. The website has links to all the communication forums and requests can be made to join the mailing list.
We look forward to hearing from more of the OASPA publisher members!
