From NLM DTD to JATS : XML for scholarly articles in Japanese

Abstract

Most of major scholarly journal articles overseas are published online in HTML as well as PDF. They are internally processed in SGML and/or XML, but distributed externally mostly in NLM DTD (NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite) that was developed and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). On the other hand, it has been very difficult to produce XML data in NLM DTD from Japanese scholarly articles which have bibliographic data, abstracts and citation data both in Japanese and English, because NLM DTD was born in the English-speaking world. The authors formed a working group, SPJ (Scholarly Publishing Japan), and worked closely together with the NLM DTD working group in the US, and submitted several proposal how NLM DTD could support multi-language articles. This effort resulted in the multi-lingual features of NISO JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) 0.4, formerly called NLM DTD 3.1, and was published in March, 2011. This article summerizes the history of markup languages such as SGML and XML in scholarly publishing, activities of SPJ, and the overview of JATS 0.4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]