The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) voting members have approved a new project to standardize the ISO Standard Tag Set (ISOSTS) in line with JATS (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012 JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite) for application by standards development organisations (SDOs) and use in the standards ecosystem. In the process of formalising ISO STS-a variant of JATS-as an ANSI/NISO standard, this new NISO initiative, NISO STS, will support input from many organisations that have begun to use it in their own publication production processes.
According to Robert Wheeler, Director, Publishing Technologies, ASME, one of the project proposers, there are currently several DTDs used for tagging standard-type information based on JATS and a number of other independently developed DTDs. This variation impedes interoperability across standards and inhibits collaboration between organisations. ISOSTS is one of these JATS derivatives, created in 2011 by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. The DTD and documentation have been openly available and used by a number of ISO members. It will be beneficial to all standards stakeholders to have the standards community collectively contribute to this new standard based on ISOSTS.
Participation in the new NISO STS initiative is encouraged from those familiar with standards production, publishing systems and XML. Familiarity with JATS is also helpful. Individuals interested in participating on this working group should contact Nettie Lagace (nlagace@niso.org).
