November 9, 2011 North Andover, MA, USA – Publishers of scholarly manuscripts benefit from a proliferation of web applications to process and manage manuscript workflow. For example, Aries’ Editorial Manager SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) has been deployed by more than 4,200 scholarly journals for manuscript submission and peer review. The growing availability of workflow systems has created the need to efficiently transfer manuscript data between systems.

The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), arising from an NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) project, is an XML standard that builds on the earlier National Library of Medicine DTDs for scholarly manuscript archiving. JATS is currently going through the standardization process at NISO (www.niso.org). Version 0.4 of JATS was released as a Draft Standard for Trial Use in March of 2011 and has been available for public comment. Following the close of this comment period at the end of September, the Working Group has been addressing the comments and suggestions. Version 1.0 will be sent to the NISO membership for a vote shortly, and is anticipated to be released in the first half of 2012.

JATS provides a standardized way to transfer manuscript data between independent systems used to manage scholarly manuscript lifecycle. Aries already uses the NLM DTD to transfer in-process manuscripts to and from compositors such as Dartmouth Journal Services.

Aries Systems announces its commitment to supporting the JATS standard because of its growing adoption outside bio-medicine and its extended support for international author name formats. Richard Wynne, VP Sales and Marketing at Aries commented, “Our business partner in Japan, Atlas Corporation, has been active in the JATS process to ensure its applicability to Japanese publishing. By supporting JATS format transmittals we can better serve Editorial Manager journals throughout the world.”

About Aries
Aries Systems transforms the way scholarly publishers bring high-value content to the world. The company’s innovative and forward-looking workflow solutions manage the complexities of modern print and electronic publishing – from submission, to editorial management and peer review, to production tracking and publishing channel distribution. As the publishing environment evolves, Aries Systems is committed to delivering solutions that help publishers and scholars enhance the discovery and dissemination of human knowledge. Publish faster, publish smarter, with Aries Systems.