Kelly McDougall (MIT Press), Mary Seligy (Canadian Science Publishing), and Stephen Laverick (Maverick) recently joined OASPA for a webinar to discuss Open Access Publishing in the Global South. Melissa Harrison (eLife) chaired the discussion. The Copyright Clearance Center hosted the webinar.
JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is an inclusive group of publishers, vendors, and other interested organisations who use the NISO Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) XML standard. On March 13, 2017, OASPA hosted a webinar on the history, goals and recent work of JATS4R, the importance of participation and outreach around JATS4R, and to provide a platform for discussions on how the initiative can be advanced in the future.
Melissa kicked off the webinar by explaining the mission of JATS4R: to advance scholarly content reuse through the development of recommendations for tagging content in JATS XML, and to provide resources to help people in all areas of interested organisations to produce better XML content. The group formed in 2014, she explained, after those working on the JATS XML standard began discussing the similar challenges they faced while mining content and negotiating licenses and decided to form a working group to implement standardisation and best practices in XML tagging practices.
Following the speakers there was some time for discussion, during which the panelists responded to questions from participants in the webinar. Asked about JATS4R's biggest achievements, Mary highlighted that the bringing together of a now tight community and robust execution of the group's marketing plan has enabled far bigger and newer audiences to JATS. Challenges for the group, though, remain; Kelly emphasised the importance of 'casting the net wide', and reaching out to all those working in all sections of the scholarly communication community. The success of JATS, she reiterated, depends on the ability of diverse sections of the publishing community to engage with it. Asked where panelists saw the role of JATS4R in the future, Stephen noted that JATS enables great flexibility and is evolving all the time; as more gets pulled into the online article, there's an obvious need for more standardisation. JATS4R will continue to evolve and give vital guidance as needed. Kelly sees JATS4R building on their excellent communications mechanisms and collaborative opportunities. JATS4R, it was reiterated, will always be there for new and returning participants, and the group hopes to hear from new interested parties as a result of this webinar.
JATS4R can be contacted at jats4r.org. The recording of this JATS for Reuse webinar, along with the accompanying slides from the discussion, are freely available for the public at http://oaspa.org/information-resources/oaspa-webinars/.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
