8.1 Rationale

The Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Set (Archiving) 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.

The intent of the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set is to preserve the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. This Tag Set enables an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material without modeling any particular sequence or textual format.

It was planned that Archiving could be used for conversion from a variety of journal source Tag Sets, with the intent of providing a single format:

• in which publishers could deliver their content to a wide range of archives, and

• into which archives could conveniently translate content from many publishers.

In order to enable description of the content used by the wide array of publishers, repositories, aggregators, etc., the Tag Set uses many loose structures, including some elements with nearly all content structures optional. Many attribute values in the Tag Set are data character values, accommodating any source values. Because some article components are prescriptive in nature (article metadata (<article-meta>), for example, is a fairly specific sequence) the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set includes a few completely generic structures for capturing semantic tagging that is not available natively in the Tag Set. Although publication order cannot always be preserved, particularly within the metadata, the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set works harder than any of the other Tag Sets in this Suite to allow almost any publication arrangement and to allow re-tagging as renaming without rearrangement during conversion.

The Archiving and Interchange Tag Set has a distinct focus on conversion from multiple sources. That focus has made this Tag Set a large and inclusive one. Many elements have been created explicitly so that information tagged by publishers would not be discarded when they converted material from another Tag Set to this one (or one created from this Suite). Care has also been taken to provide several mechanisms (frequently, information classing attributes) to preserve the intellectual content of a document structure when that structure is converted from another Tag Set or schema to this one, even when there is no exact element equivalent of the structure.

The exact replication of the look and feel of any particular journal has not been a consideration. Therefore, many purely formatting mechanisms have not been included. At the same time, Archiving is intended to preserve observed content, without resorting to stylesheets or generation of textual elements. For that reason, labels, numbers, and symbols of tables, figures, sidebars, and the like can be recorded as elements, as can the punctuation and spaces inside bibliographic references and lists.

8.2 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.

8.3 Structural Overview

The Journal Archiving and Interchange 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 (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.