The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), in partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), has published the Recommended Practice Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group (NISO-RP-8-2008). The publication is designed to provide a simple, practical way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication. This document is freely available from the NISO website at www.niso.org/publications/rp/.
In September 2005, NISO launched the partnership with ALPSP to bring together experts from the publishing, library, library systems, and user communities to examine the problems associated with the proliferation of different article versions. Led initially by Cliff Morgan, VP, Planning & Development Director at John Wiley & Sons Ltd., the group focused its attention on describing the important stages in the production of scientific articles.
The JAV Working Group also created use cases to explore the lifecycle of journal articles, starting from a base case that describes interaction among author, institutional repository, and publisher. The group focused on key stages in recording a document's development rather than addressing all possible iterations of an article from origination to publication.
Several variables were considered as possible dimensions to identify a particular article version. These included time: from first draft to latest version; added value: from rough draft to polished publication; manifestation/rendition: different document formats and layouts; siblings: multiple mappings between technical reports, conference papers, lectures, journal articles, review articles, etc; and stakeholders: author, editor, referee, publisher, librarian, reader, funding organisation. Components of the JAV Recommended Practice include a narrative that explains the project background and rationale for recommended terms and definitions. The appendices comprise a set of use cases showing application of the recommended terms and a graphical representation of journal article versions and relationships with formal and gray literature.
NISO plans to aggressively promote use of the JAV recommendations in the information dissemination community over the coming months.
