Aries Systems Corporation

There is much buzz around the Journal Article Tag Suite, also known as JATS. Most recently, a Scholarly Kitchen article shed light on JATS4R, a working group that seeks to optimize reusability of JATS tagged content.

In the article, Canadian Science Publishing’s Mary Seligy, a business analyst says, “The principal mission of JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is to optimize the reusability of scholarly content tagged in JATS XML, by developing XML tagging best practices. JATS4R is an actively growing international and inclusive working group comprising publishers, typesetters/compositors, delivery-platform folk, archivists, persistent-identifier people, and other assorted stakeholders — all united in JATS4R’s vision of a world in which scholarly content travels seamlessly to its users, facilitated by its reusability.”

Aries has a successful track record of integrating standards such as JATS into Editorial Manager.. As part of this ongoing commitment Aries Senior Business Analyst, Caroline Webber, participates in the JATS4R working group.

“Aries is committed to best practice adoption,” said Webber. “My role [on JATS4R] is to share opinions and guide the group based on our customers’ experiences.”

As there are, within the JATS standard, many options for tagging the same element, it takes knowledge of real world use cases for applicable reusability-focused recommendations to emerge.

According to Webber, the most important thing for the community to know about JATS, and the work of JATS4R, is that the standard is extremely flexible.

For example, it is JATS that makes cross-system interchange, also known as MECA, possible.