NISO Approval Ballot for JATS 1.3 Opening Soon

NISO has notified its Voting Members that they have 15 days to join the Voting Pool to approve the latest draft of ANSI/NISO Z39.96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite.   The new draft, technically known right now as BSR/NISO Z39.96-202x, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite (1.3) (revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019 - JATS 1.2) incorporates changes made to JATS 1.2 through December 2020.

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 between publishers and archives. This Tag Suite is intended to preserve intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which the content was originally delivered, and to enable 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. 

The JATS Standing Committee manages its work via Continuous Maintenance procedures, which support incoming comments to be managed in an ongoing process of updates. The SC continues to meet regularly to discuss future changes and strategies for JATS, including a non-backwards compatible JATS 2.0 and its process.

In order to ensure that NISO standards are developed by consensus for the benefit of the greater information community, public comments are regularly solicited on NISO standards and other consensus documents (e.g., recommended practices), during development via open lists, during trial use phases, and when at ballot.  This review period for JATS will also be included as an announcement in the ANSI Standards Action newsletter. Draft materials are available from NISO upon request. If you are not a NISO Voting Member and wish to join the consensus body (Voting Pool) please contact the NISO Office.  There may be fees associated with non-Voting Member participation. 

More information about balloting and periodic review can be found in the NISO Operating Procedures. For information on joining the consensus body voting pool, see section 5.3.4.