JATS XML
The XML format scholarly publishing runs on, and what Kotahi does with it.
What JATS is
Section titled “What JATS is”JATS — the Journal Article Tag Suite — is the standard way of describing a scholarly article as structured data rather than as a page. It is a NISO standard, and it is what most of the scholarly infrastructure expects to receive.
A PDF tells a machine almost nothing. It has words on pages, but nothing in it says this is the abstract, this is the third author’s affiliation, this is a reference to another paper. JATS says all of that explicitly.
Why it matters
Section titled “Why it matters”Because other systems read it. Indexes, archives, preservation services and aggregators take JATS and use it to work out what your article is, who wrote it, what it cites and who funded it. Without it, your content can be read by people but not by anything else — which in practice means it is harder to find, harder to cite and harder to preserve.
It is also the format you will be asked for. A publisher who wants to be in PubMed Central, or who is depositing into an archive, will be asked for JATS rather than PDFs.
What Kotahi does with it
Section titled “What Kotahi does with it”You tag the article visually. JATS tagging is built into the editor on the Production page — there is a JATS side menu and a list of the tags applied. Nobody has to write XML by hand.
Kotahi does the conversion. It produces JATS 1.3 journal publishing XML with MathML, and it handles the parts that are tedious to do well: citations, funding statements, keywords, appendices, glossaries, and tables with their captions. Mathematics written in LaTeX is converted to images so it survives in formats that cannot render equations.
Kotahi validates what it produces, against the published JATS schema rather than simply emitting XML and assuming it is correct.
Where it goes
Section titled “Where it goes”JATS is what Kotahi sends when it deposits your content. The metadata that reaches Crossref and DataCite is built from it.
So for most groups JATS is not something you handle directly. You tag the article, and Kotahi produces and deposits the XML as part of publishing. See Settings: Integrations and publishing for the endpoints themselves.