---
title: "Journal Article Tag Suite"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_Article_Tag_Suite"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:22.745801+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is  format used to describe  scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National Standards Institute with the code Z39.96-2012.
The NISO project was a continuation of the work done by NLM/NCBI, and popularized by the NLM's PubMed Central as a de facto standard for archiving and interchange of scientific open-access journals and its contents with XML.
With the NISO standardization the NLM initiative has gained a wider reach, and several other repositories, such as SciELO and Redalyc, adopted the XML formatting for scientific articles.
The JATS provides a set of XML elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles
as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.
JATS allows for descriptions of the full article content or just the article header metadata; 
and allows other kinds of contents, including research and non-research articles, letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.

== History ==
Since its introduction, NCBI's NLM Archiving and Interchange DTD suite has become the de facto standard for journal article markup in scholarly publishing. With the introduction of NISO JATS, it has been elevated to a true standard.
Even without public data interchange, the advantages of NISO JATS adoption affords publishers in terms of streamlining production workflows and optimizing system interoperability.

=== Timeline ===
NLM JATS
NLM JATS, version 1
March 31, 2003 (2003-03-31): NLM DTD v1.0 introduced.
November 5, 2003 (2003-11-05): Version 1.1  update released.
NLM JATS, version 2
December 30, 2004 (2004-12-30): Version 2.0 major update released. It is designed to support customization best-practices.
November 14, 2005 (2005-11-14): Version 2.1 update released with the addition the Article Authoring DTD.
June 8, 2006 (2006-06-08): Version 2.2 update released.
March 28, 2007 (2007-03-28): Version 2.3 update released.
NLM JATS, version 3
November 21, 2008 (2008-11-21): Version 3.0 major update released.
NISO JATS
NISO JATS, version 1.0
March 30, 2011 (2011-03-30) – September 30, 2011 (2011-09-30): First draft, NISO Z39.96.201x version 0.4 released; six-month comment period.
July 15, 2012 (2012-07-15): NISO JATS, v1.0 received NISO approval.
August 9, 2012 (2012-08-09): NISO JATS, v1.0 received ANSI approval.
August 22, 2012 (2012-08-22): ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite (version 1.0) published. It supports full backward-compatibility with NLM JATS v3.0.
NISO JATS, version 1.1
December 9, 2013 (2013-12-09): First draft, NISO JATS, v1.1d1 released.
December 29, 2014 (2014-12-29): Second draft, NISO JATS, v1.1d2 released.
April 14, 2015 (2015-04-14): Third draft, NISO JATS, v1.1d released.
October 22, 2015 (2015-10-22): NISO JATS, v1.1 received NISO approval.
November 19, 2015 (2015-11-19): NISO JATS, v1.1 received ANSI approval
January 6, 2016 (2016-01-06): ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, version 1.1 published.
NISO JATS, version 1.2
July 20, 2017 (2017-07-20): First draft, NISO JATS, v1.2d1 released.
May 23, 2018 (2018-05-23): First draft, NISO JATS, v1.2d2 released.
February 8, 2019 (2019-02-08): ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, version 1.2 published.
NISO JATS, version 1.3
July 7, 2021 (2021-07-07): ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2021, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, version 1.3 published.
NISO JATS, version 1.4
October 31, 2024: ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2024, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, version 1.4 published.

== Technical scope ==
By design, this is a model for journal articles, such as the typical research article found in an STM journal, and not a model for complete journals.

=== Tag sets ===

There are three tag sets:

Journal Archiving and Interchange (Green)
"The most permissive of the Tag Sets," primarily intended for the capture and archiving of extant journal data.
Journal Publishing (Blue)
"A moderately prescriptive Tag Set," intended for general use in journal production and publication.
Formally this model is a subset of the Archiving model. This is the most frequently used JATS variant.
Article Authoring (Orange)
"The most prescriptive [tightest and smallest] of the Tag Sets," intended for the relatively lightweight creation of journal articles valid to JATS.
Formally this model a subset of the Publishing model.
Document type definitions (also released in the form of RELAX NG and XML schema) define each set and incorporate other standards such as MathML and XHTML Tables (although not in the XHTML namespace).

=== Document structure ===
JATS Publishing set defines a document that is a top-level component of a journal such as an article, a book or product review, or a letter to the editor. Each such document is composed of front matter (required) and up to three optional parts. These must appear in the following order:

Front matter
The article front matter contains the metadata for the article (also called article header information), for example, the article title, the journal in which it appears, the date and issue of publication for that issue of that journal, a copyright statement, etc. Both article-level and issue-level metadata (in the element <article-meta>) and journal-level metadata (in the element <journal-meta>) may be captured.
Body (of the article)
The body of the article is the main textual and graphic content of the article. This usually consists of paragraphs and sections, which may themselves contain figures, tables, sidebars (boxed text), etc. The body of the article is optional to accommodate those repositories that just keep article header information and do not tag the textual content.
Back matter
If present, the article back matter contains information that is ancillary to the main text, such as a glossary, appendix, or list of cited references.
Floating material
A publisher may choose to place all the floating objects in an article and its back matter (such as tables, figures, boxed text sidebars, etc.) into a separate container element outside the narrative flow for convenience of processing.
Following the front, body, back, and floating material, there may be either one or more responses to the article or one or more subordinate articles.

== Example ==
This is the minimal article's structure,