A particularly nice feature of Fiduswriter is its capability to generate JATS XML files. JATS XML is short for Journal Article Tag Suite XML, an international standard XML-tag set for journal articles (https://jats.nlm.nih.gov) that is formally described in ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015 JATS (https://www.xml.com/articles/2018/10/12/introduction-jats/). As early as 2000 the NCBI (United States National Center for Biological Information) launched PubMed Central (PMC) together with a number of journals and for these journals the NCBI developed a first, simple (XML) tag suite with their associated DTDs (document type definitions) - see https://www.escienceediting.org/upload/se-1-2-99.pdf. Remember, XML is about tags and a tag is simply a word encircled by < at the beginning and by > at the end. For example:<address> </address>
or
<country> </country>
where the information - in our case the address - comes in between the two address tags - the start tag and the end tag. The process of adding tags to a plain text is know as tagging. The tags in an XML file are not arbitrary - they are specified in the so-called DTDs (document type definitions) or schemas. There also exist DTDs for JATS XML and information that is specified within tags in a JATS XML file are for example:
- title
- author(s)
- year
- ISBN
and so forth. The JATS XML format brings a number of advantages to academic publishing:
- machine readable: document content is searchable on the internet - this is not possible with pdf;
- single source publishing: allows conversion to PDF, epub, HTML5 or other formats;
- bibliographic reference capability: references are built into the format and JATS XML allows the rapid conversion of references into DOI (digital object identifier) formats such as CrossRef XML, CrossMark XML, and FundRef XML.
- metadata: such as title, author(s), year, DOI etc.
JATS tag sets (e.g. in DTD document type definitions or XSD) are available free from https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/. Fiduswriter can export a document in JATS XML format as shown here:
The exported JATS XML file is zipped up and contains two individual text files named manuscript.xml and manifest.xml. The content of the latter file is shown here:
The content of the manuscript.xml sister file that contains the actual text of the fiduswriter document is shown here: latter file is shown here:
In this very simple example the text is listed in black colour at the end of the text. If there is graphics inside the Fiduswriter document, these images are exported as separate files into the *.zip file as shown below:
Whether it is possible to submit a journal paper as a JATS file depends on the publishing house. Fiduswriter outputs JATS, but that doesn't necessarily mean the publisher accepts the Fiduswriter JATS output - many publishers want specific subversions of JATS that Fiduswriter may not comply with. It is frequently claimed that JATS XML is the future of publishing - but there is problems too as described in https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/Ravne/article/view/5517.