If your journal wants to enter SciELO, DOAJ, or be retrievable in PubMed Central, sooner or later the acronym JATS shows up. It sounds technical, but the underlying idea is simple. This article explains it without jargon.
What is JATS?
JATS ( Journal Article Tag Suite ) is a standard for describing a scientific article in XML: a text format that labels each part of the document by what it is , not by how it looks. The title goes in a title tag, each author in an author tag, the abstract, the sections, the references, the figures… all marked so a machine can understand it.
What is it for?
Indexes and databases don't «read» a PDF the way a person does. They need structured data to know the title, the authors, the DOI and the cited references. JATS is the common language those systems expect.
- Correct, faster indexing in SciELO, DOAJ, Latindex and Redalyc.
- Metadata submission to Crossref to register the DOI.
- Long-term preservation: the content survives even if the design changes.
The common mistake
«We generate the XML at the end, by converting the PDF.» Converting a finished PDF to XML is fragile and costly: the structure was already lost during layout.
The alternative is to produce the XML from the same source as the PDF and HTML —the single-source model—. That way JATS XML isn't extra work at the end, but just another output of the same structured source.
At Macomti, JATS XML comes out of the ConTeXt environment alongside the PDF/A and HTML. If your journal needs to index, let's talk: see our services .