Aries Systems Corporation

Hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI of the NIH), the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) is a meeting dedicated to those interested or using JATS, an XML format for marking up and exchanging journal content. JATS-Con 2020, originally scheduled for late April at NIH in Bethesda, MD, will be postponed to a future date due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the JATS-Con 2020 Proceedings are publicly available online for anyone interested in reviewing the content that is to be presented during the meeting.

Conference presentations are peer-reviewed and result in a final paper that is stored in the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference Proceedings archive. Included in this year’s Proceedings is a paper authored by and Aries Systems Senior Business Systems Analyst Sally Ubnoske and NCBI Technical Information Specialist Laura Randall titled, “MECA and JATS Compatibility: A case study utilizing the JATS Compatibility Meta Model”. This paper details the “analysis of the MECA schemas against the JATS Meta Model” and the measures taken to readjust the schemas and modes to reach success.

The Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) is a cross-organizational collaboration project lead by the NISO MECA Working Group. MECA strives to facilitate and standardize multiple types of manuscript exchange to avoid loss of important data during manuscript transfer across publications, even if the publications use different peer review systems. “MECA establishes a vocabulary set that includes transfer, review, and manifest models. These models are designed to work with different article XML schemas, including the latest NISO JATS standard. In order to avoid conflicts between these project vocabularies and the JATS, we reviewed the MECA vocabularies against the NISO JATS Compatibility Meta Model.” To learn more about the analysis and results, read the published paper.