Contribution to JATS-Con 2015

[Daniel-Mietchen]

It would be nice to prepare a JATS4R contribution to JATS-Con.

Submissions are due by November 14: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/forms/JATSsubmission.html .

That fits with our original plan of having something ready by Open Access Week, which is three weeks earlier.

Google doc for draft of our paper: Improving the reusability of JATS

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Submitted.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Reopening, since the JATS4R abstract has made it into the JATSCon program: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/2015/schedule2015a.html .

Further instructions: " Full papers in XML are due by March 13, 2015. The submission guidelines are here: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/submission-guidelines.html. Please let me know if you have any questions or problems along the way. I've pasted in feedback from the reviewers that may be helpful as you put together the full paper and your presentation.

If you have not yet registered for the conference, you can do so here at any time: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/forms/JATSregistration.html "

Reviews:

Reviewer 1:

I applaud the effort to bring together interested parties to create a series of recommendations for tagging content in a manner that will allow it to be more easily reused. I wonder whether individual publishers will be the ones to implement the recommendations in their internal tagging, or if it will be up to an aggregator (such as PMC) to act as the implementer (when they receive content and take it through their own conversion process)? I'm sure the first is intended, but might the second be more practical, once an organization can cite the recommendations (rather than making it up themselves)?

Reviewer 2:

The issue of JATS reusability is one that interests and challenges a wide audience, and it's good to see work being put in to improve ease of reuse - what a huge task! Many people would benefit from learning about the approaches your group is taking and suggestions you have for best practices.

As far as suggestions for the paper itself, mainly, I just wanted a little more. Is the paper/presentation a report on the establishment and early efforts of the working group? Or is it a treatise on the problem of JATS reusability itself and recommended solutions for standardization? I just wanted the abstract to be fleshed out a bit to show the purpose and direction of the paper/presentation more clearly

Reviewer 3:

Among NLM DTD's initial design principles was the easy adaptability of all other scholarly publishing DTDs into JATS (true at least for the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set). Given the diversity of allowable formats and structures in those other DTDs, JATS was by definition a very permissive DTD. It is a known fact that with permissiveness comes inconsistency and with inconsistency comes reduced re-usability. So the goal of XML re-usability seems to come in stark contrast with the initial NLM/JATS design somehow.

However, once we overcome the initial hurdle of the legacy content, on-going content can and should attempt to be consistent for the sake of XML consumers down the line. Working with a permissive DTD, the only way you can lead users in the right direction is through "best practices" documentation and potentially, when all that effort hits prime time, through optional Schematron rules which enforce these best practices.

There is long road ahead for the JATS4Reuse workgroup, but the effort will eventually pay off when by employing specific practices coming out of this group, JATS will not only facilitate archiving but also interchange.

As a side-effect of this re-usability effort, the JATS4Reuse group may propose modifications and/or enhancements in areas of the DTD that do not naturally lend themselves for re-use. This is exactly the kind of changes that future revisions of JATS should be aiming for.

[Melissa37]

Thanks for posting the reviews Daniel. This is useful info to help shape the paper.

[Klortho]

I created a Google doc for this here: Improving the reusability of JATS. Right now it is not much more than a skeleton. Please hack away.

[Melissa37]

Beginnings of the slides are here https://docs.google.com/a/elifesciences.org/presentation/d/17dIbIRlLJ6sBQh_gAxX9izm6yaZoFAk9RRLo2QaOSng/edit#slide=id.g8fd38d72c_0_165

Needs work and input form other presenters!