Remarks

Best Practice: The dates inside the <history> element are used to preserve events other than publication date(s) in the life cycle of the article. Publication dates are considered to be an important part of the article metadata and are tagged using the <pub-date> element. History dates include received date(s), accepted date(s), reviewed date(s), revision date(s), and other dates that may be important to the publisher, but are not a likely part of the article metadata for searching, building a DOI, etc.

The <history> element contains one more <date> and/or <string-date> elements; the <date> element has specific parts, such as day and year, inside it and the <string-date> has a textual description of a date. Best practice for the <history> element is to use to use <date> as much as possible and tag the date components. The <string-date> element should be used only when necessary, for example, when the date does not divide into year and month components. If an archive chooses to make greater use of <string-date>, for example, to save money during conversion, it is still considered best practice to tag the year of publication inside the textual date using a +<year> element.

The Archiving and Interchange Tag Set allows <string-date> both inside date and at the same level as date. This is the most flexible for allowing the archive to preserve any publisher’s structure. The tighter Tag Sets created from the base Suite may choose to use one or the other in preference.