Explainer · Plain-language
Jats: Definition, Meaning & Examples | CASRAI
JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) is a NISO standard XML vocabulary for marking up the full text and metadata of scholarly journal articles. It is the lingua franca that publishers, archives, and indexers use to exchange articles in a structured, machine-readable form.
The step most authors miss
Doing CRediT right? Don’t stop at the statement.
A CRediT statement credits you inside one paper. The recognition CRediT was built for happens when those roles are tied to you, persistently. Sign in with your ORCID — free — and claim your CRediT contributions on casrai.org, the home of the standard. They become a verified, portable part of your identity, not a line that disappears into one PDF.
Free: claim your contributions, then export a journal-ready CRediT statement, schema.org structured data, JATS XML, CSV or BibTeX — and preview your public profile. A membership publishes that profile publicly and verifies the journals you serve.
Where JATS came from
JATS grew out of the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD developed by the US National Library of Medicine for PubMed Central. NISO adopted and standardised it as ANSI/NISO Z39.96, first published in 2012 and revised since. It is maintained as an open standard with periodic updates by a NISO standing committee.
The three tag sets
JATS defines three tag sets for different stages: the Archiving and Interchange (Green) tag set is the most permissive, used for ingesting and preserving content; the Journal Publishing (Blue) tag set is more prescriptive, used for producing new content; and the Article Authoring (Pumpkin/Orange) tag set is the strictest, aimed at authoring tools.
Contributors and CRediT in JATS
JATS encodes each contributor in a <contrib> element and can record their CRediT roles using the <role> element with vocab="credit" and a vocab-term-identifier pointing at the NISO CRediT URI. This makes per-author per-role attribution machine-readable, which is how submission systems carry CRediT through to publication.
JATS4R — getting it right
Because JATS is permissive, the same information can be tagged in several valid ways. JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is a community group that publishes recommendations for consistent, interoperable tagging — including a specific recommendation for how to encode CRediT contributor roles — so downstream systems can reliably extract the data.
Key facts
At a glance
- Full name: Journal Article Tag Suite
- Standard: ANSI/NISO Z39.96
- Origin: NLM/PubMed Central archiving DTD
- Tag sets: Archiving (Green), Publishing (Blue), Authoring (Pumpkin)
- CRediT: <role vocab="credit" vocab-term-identifier="...">
- Best practice: JATS4R recommendations
Common misconceptions
What people often get wrong
Often heard: JATS is a file format like PDF.
Actually: No — JATS is an XML tagging model, not a display format. PDF and HTML are renderings; JATS is the structured source that machines parse.
Often heard: There is one single JATS schema.
Actually: No — JATS defines three related tag sets (Archiving, Publishing, Authoring) with different levels of strictness for different stages of the workflow.
Going deeper
