NISO
NLMThe Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is the prevailing XML standard for encoding scholarly journal articles in full text. Defined as NISO Z39.96, it provides a rich, structured vocabulary for marking up every component of a journal article -- from front matter and body text to figures, tables, references, and supplementary materials. JATS underpins the digital infrastructure of scientific publishing, used by major publishers, PubMed Central, and repository systems worldwide.
Background
JATS traces its origins to 2002, when the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine began developing the NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD. The goal was to create a common XML format that could faithfully represent journal articles from diverse publishers for long-term archiving in PubMed Central (PMC). As the DTD gained adoption beyond NLM, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) took it through formal standardization, publishing it as ANSI/NISO Z39.96 in 2012. The standard has been revised through versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and the current 1.4 (2024).
Purpose and Scope
JATS defines a set of XML elements and attributes for tagging the full content of journal articles. It addresses not only the article text but also structured metadata (authors, affiliations, funding, keywords), mathematical notation (via MathML), chemical structures, tables, figures with captions, and bibliographic references. The standard is designed to support both the original rendering of an article and its long-term preservation and interchange between systems.
JATS provides three article models, each reflecting a different level of prescriptiveness:
- Journal Archiving and Interchange -- The most permissive tag set, designed to accommodate articles from many publishers with varying structures
- Journal Publishing -- A moderately prescriptive tag set suited for publishers producing new content
- Article Authoring -- The most prescriptive, intended for authors creating articles from scratch
Extensions
JATS has spawned related tag suites for adjacent domains:
| Extension | Purpose |
|---|---|
| BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite) | XML encoding for books and book components |
| NISO STS (Standards Tag Suite) | XML encoding for standards documents |
Serializations and Technical Formats
JATS is an XML application. Articles are encoded as well-formed XML documents conforming to the JATS DTD or XML Schema. The standard defines both DTD and XSD schema representations. JATS documents are typically stored as .xml files and rendered for display through XSLT transformations or specialized publishing platforms.
Governance and Maintenance
JATS is maintained by the NISO Z39.96 standing committee, with the supporting documentation and reference materials hosted by NCBI at the National Library of Medicine. The JATS-Con conference series (held periodically since 2009) brings together publishers, technologists, and standards developers to share experiences and advance the standard.
Notable Implementations
PubMed Central (PMC), the full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences literature at the NLM, is the largest single repository of JATS-encoded content. Major commercial publishers including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis produce JATS XML as part of their production workflows. The Crossref and CHORUS initiatives use JATS metadata. Open-source tools such as the JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) recommendations guide consistent implementation across the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
Related Standards
- EPUB -- Electronic publication format that can incorporate JATS-encoded content
- Dublin Core -- Metadata elements frequently embedded within JATS article headers
- MathML -- Mathematical markup language used within JATS for equations