JATS XML — Journal Article Tag Suite — is the international standard for the representation, exchange, and archiving of journal article content. Adopted by PubMed Central, CrossRef, and major academic publishers, understanding JATS is essential for any modern publishing workflow.
What Is JATS?
JATS is a set of XML elements and attributes maintained by NISO (National Information Standards Organization). It defines a common format so that article content can be rendered across multiple platforms, indexed by databases, and preserved for long-term archiving.
The Three JATS Flavours
- Archiving and Interchange (Green) — For archiving final published articles
- Publishing (Blue) — For journal publishers to deliver tagged content
- Article Authoring (Orange) — For authors to submit articles
Key Tag Structures
A JATS document has three main sections:
<front>— Metadata: journal info, article-meta, authors, abstract<body>— Full article content: sections, paragraphs, figures, tables<back>— References, appendices, acknowledgements
Why Publishers Need JATS
JATS-tagged content can be automatically ingested by PubMed Central, making it discoverable by millions of researchers. It also enables semantic enrichment, machine-readable metadata, and interoperability with downstream systems like DOI registration and full-text indexing.
Our JATS XML conversion service ensures your content meets PMC, CrossRef, and publisher-specific DTD requirements with full validation and quality checks.