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JATS-Con 2025 Schedule with Abstracts

JATS-Con 2025 will be held in person at NISOPlus 2025 in Baltimore, MD on February 10, 2025.

February 10, 2025

8:45-9:00

Welcome and Introductions

9:00-9:45

Standards, adoptions, collections ... oh, my!: A case study on NISO-STS document expressivity

G. Ken Holman, Réalta Online Publishing Solutions Ltd.

National Standards Bodies (NSBs) around the world are responsible for publishing national standards authored for their jurisdiction. Some also have membership obligations or business rationales to republish standards work products from other standards organizations. The resulting document is called an adoption, and consists of national container material wrapping the sourced standard material.

The legacy ISOSTS (ISO Standards Tag Set) vocabulary's accommodation for this three-layer adoption is explicit. The successor NISO-STS (National Information Standards Organization Standards Tag Set) vocabulary is backward compatible to ISOSTS but looks forward by accommodating any number of layers of adoption.

This is a case study on standards and adoptions, illustrating how some traditional NSBs have leveraged such any number of layers for new work products and new revenue opportunities. They achieve this by publishing legacy and future standards in new combinations colloquially termed collections.

The paper concludes with a deterministic formal distinction between a standard, an adoption, and a collection for NISO-STS XML documents.

9:45-10:30

Challenges/solutions for multilingual document formatting

Michael A. Miller, Antenna House

Globalization often requires us to present the same information in multiple languages. The presentation will discuss the problems of multilingual formatting, examples of formatting, some of the issues/complexities, and considerations in putting together a solution.

10:30-10:45

Coffee Break

10:45-11:30

Application of the JATS for Reuse Accessibility Recommendations

Jeffrey Beck, NCBI/NLM/NIH
Melissa Jones, Silverchair
Joni Dames, Wiley

This paper explores the JATS4R recommendations for tagging Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) XML articles with a focus on advancing accessibility in scholarly publishing. While the JATS Standard provides a flexible XML framework, the JATS4R Recommendations offer best practices for using JATS to promote consistent and accessible content. Divergences between the JATS Standard and JATS4R are expected, as JATS4R is more prescriptive to meet user accessibility needs across various platforms.

We emphasize the importance of prioritizing accessibility throughout the publication workflow, highlighting the Accessibility Recommendation's goal of enabling accessible presentations of JATS XML articles. Addressing potential challenges, such as alt-text creation and table heading requirements, we propose solutions that balance practical constraints with the imperative to meet global accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG, Section 508, EU Accessibility Act). These recommendations are not mandatory but serve as pathways to compliance with legal and ethical accessibility requirements.

The paper also introduces tools for verifying accessibility in structured content, from pre-JATS XML stages through publication, including checklists for authors, editors, and publishers, and guidance on exporting accessibility metadata. The JATS4R Validator and Schematron rules are also presented.

Finally, we discuss strategies for creating accessible renderings of JATS-compliant XML, emphasizing the importance of integrating accessibility checks throughout the document lifecycle. By embedding these practices early in the workflow, organizations can achieve more accessible, compliant, and reusable content with greater efficiency and reduced cost.

11:30-12:15

Accessible Math at Scale: How JATS and intelligent editing tools rise to the challenge

Scott Dineen, Optica Publishing Group
Jennifer Mayfield, Optica Publishing Group
Alexander "Sasha" Schwarzman, Optica Publishing Group

Pressure to produce journals faster and more cheaply while also complying with accessibility obligations poses a special challenge for math notation. Especially as the European Accessibility Act and the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act begin imposing new requirements in 2025 and 2026, publishers will need to meet their accessibility obligations with the math in their articles and do so without breaking the bank. This presentation will lay out some of the challenges with producing quality, compliant math in a high-volume, fast-paced scholarly journal and explain how popular XML desktop tools, Schematron quality control, and JATS markup can best be used for optimal results with math markup. The talk will also explain how, with JATS, both MathML and LaTeX math notation can be used together in the same workflow and how one publisher developed a novel math editing tool in oXygen Editor, specifically for use with JATS articles, through the help of ChatGPT.

12:15-1:45

Lunch on your own

1:45-2:30

Roundtripping Journal Article Linked Documents and Journal Article Tag Suite

Rinke Hoekstra, Elsevier
Charles O'Connor, Aries Systems
Edgar Schouten, Elsevier

We describe a method for roundtripping between two NISO/ANSI data serialisation formats for scholarly content. We are transforming XML documents conforming to JATS (Z39.96) Article Authoring DTD to a Linked Document conforming to a Content Profile based on the CP/LD-standard (Z39.96-2015). The two data serialisation formats run on different philosophies. The Tag Library of JATS has a collection of 256 elements, some with a very specific semantic, such as ack, conf-loc, collab-name-alternatives. The Linked Documents keeps the narrative in a lighter HTML structure and offloads the semantics of the serialisation to a linked-data graph that is referenced from the HTML. This creates a couple of challanges for the transformation, related to the the question: what goes where?

We present a Linked Document that expresses the equivalent to its JATS-structured counterpart, and the transformations that were used to create one from the other.

2:30-3:15

JATS Open Session

3:15-3:30

Coffee Break

3:30-4:15

An Open Innovation Approach to Extending WordPress to Create Automated, Seamless Export of XML for Multi-Platform Public Access and Discovery

Alexei N. Yukna, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program
Stacy M. Lathrop, NCBI/NLM/NIH
Patrick Harris, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program
Susan E. Douglas, NCBI/NLM/NIH
Rachel D. Lastra, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program
Johanna L. Gribble, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program
Jennifer R. Ham, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program
Mary Beth Hansen, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases Clinical Guidelines Program

The New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute's Clinical Guidelines Program (CGP) produces and uses WordPress to publish online a large suite of complex clinical practice guidelines for medical care providers. The guidelines are also made freely accessible and indexed as full text on the Bookshelf website of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The success of this cross-platform content exchange and distribution depended on the creation and implementation of a system that exports the original WordPress-managed CGP guidelines in an extensible markup language (XML) format compatible with NLM's Book Interchange v2.0 Journal Article Tag Suite extension specifications and Bookshelf Tagging Guidelines. By leveraging WordPress's flexibility and open-source ecosystem and employing an open innovation strategy, the developers custom-built a system that complies with mutually agreed-upon standards, meets the needs of non-technical users, ensures content fidelity, and adheres to the NLM's rigorous technical and other content requirements based on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.

The resulting scalable system streamlines and automates cross-platform exchange, distribution, and discovery of the CGP guidelines; ensures consistent XML output; can be updated to accommodate evolving needs; and reduces demand on stakeholder resources. Key features include custom content types and templates for structured content management, an intuitive workflow for CGP editors and producers, automated integration and publication of citations and references from the proprietary EndNote reference manager, and one-click XML content exports validated against NLM standards.

This paper describes WordPress configuration, system design and development strategies, challenges, and the resulting solutions that ensure data accuracy and compliance. Notable challenges included managing complex XML schemas, training non-technical editorial and production staff on WordPress and XML requirements, and coordinating input from multidisciplinary teams at the GCP and NCBI. Through insights into the open innovation approach, discussion of lessons learned, and exploration of the replication potential for this system's application in similar contexts, we showcase the use of open-source tools like WordPress for driving innovation in multi-platform interchange and distribution of content relevant to scholars and health professionals.

4:15-5:00

From Valid XML to Valuable XML: When "Good" Matters More Than "Valid"

Mark Gross, Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)

In scholarly publishing, "valid" XML is often considered the de facto output of production workflows. But as anyone who has encountered issues due to a misplaced hyphen or em dash in a DOI knows, valid does not always mean functional—or good. Small errors in XML can create massive downstream disruptions, from failed deposits in Crossref or PubMed Central to delays in content discovery on critical platforms. Beyond punctuation problems, insufficiently tagged references hinder discoverability or placeholder text in tags can validate but undermine meaning.

This session explores why automated QA/QC processes are essential to ensure that XML not only validates but also meets the nuanced, real-world demands of publishing workflows. We'll dive into examples of how seemingly minor discrepancies can have outsized consequences and provide strategies to safeguard against these pitfalls, ensuring your XML achieves more thn complianc—it achieves excellence.