9.1 Rationale

The Journal Publishing Tag (Publishing) Set defines elements and attributes that describe the content and metadata of journal articles, including research and non-research articles, letters, editorials, and book and product reviews. The Tag Set allows for descriptions of the full article content or just the article header metadata.

Publishing is a moderately prescriptive tag set, optimized for archives that wish to regularize and control their content, not to accept the sequence and arrangement presented to them by any particular publisher. The Tag Set is also intended for use by publishers for the initial XML tagging of journal material, usually as converted from an authoring form like Microsoft Word.

Because Publishing is optimized for regularizing an archive or establishing a sequence of elements to aid print and web production, the Tag Set is smaller than the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set. There are fewer elements, fewer choices in many contexts, and a particular element sequence is imposed more often.

The philosophy of this Publishing Tag Set is to prefer a single structural form whenever possible. The Publishing Tag Set is optimized for regularizing an archive or establishing a sequence of elements to aid print and web production. Elements and tagging choices are limited to produce consistent data structures to enable output products and to provide a single location of information for searching.

9.2 Scope

By design, this is a model for journal articles, such as the typical research article found in an STM journal, and not a model for complete journals. This Tag Set does not include an overarching model for a collection of articles. In addition, the following journal material is not described by this Tag Set:

• Company, product, or service display advertising

• Job search or classified advertising

• Calendars, meeting schedules, and conference announcements (except as these can be tagged as ordinary articles, sub-articles, or sections within articles)

• Material specific to an individual journal, such as Author Guidelines, Policy and Scope statements, editorial or advisory boards, detailed indicia, etc.

9.3 Structural Overview

The Journal Publishing Tag Set defines a document that is a top-level component of a journal such as an article, a book or product review, or a letter to the editor. Each such document is composed of one or more parts; if there is more than one part, they must appear in the following order:

• Front matter (required). The article front matter contains the metadata for the article (also called article header information), for example, the article title, the journal in which it appears, the date and issue of publication for that issue of that journal, a copyright statement, etc. This is not textual front matter as appears in books, rather this is bibliographic information about the article and the journal in which it was published.

• Body of the article (optional). The body of the article is the main textual and graphic content of the article. This usually consists of paragraphs and sections, which may themselves contain figures, tables, sidebars (boxed text), etc. The body of the article is optional to accommodate those repositories that just keep article header information and do not tag the textual content.

• Back matter for the article (optional). If present, the article back matter contains information that is ancillary to the main text, such as a glossary, appendix, or list of cited references.

• Floating Material (optional). A publisher may choose to place all the floating objects in an article and its back matter (such as tables, figures, boxed text sidebars, etc.) into a separate container element outside the narrative flow for convenience of processing.

• Following the front, body, back, and floating material, there may be either one or more responses to the article or one or more subordinate articles:

  • Response. A response is a commentary on the article itself, for example, an opinion from an editor on the importance of the article or a reply from the original author to a letter concerning his article.

  • Sub-article. A sub-article is a small article that is completely contained inside another article.