JATS for Judaica. Designing an XML-first Publication Workflow for a Humanities Journal.

Abstract

At the end of 2018, the oldest German-language journal in Jewish Studies, Judaica, seized publication; it had appeared in print since 1945. In spring 2019, a new editorial board came together and decided to continue the journal digitally and in open access. They chose Bern Open Publishing (BOP), an OJS-based publication service by the university library’s open science team, to host the new series. Judaica will feature not only PDFs but also HTML and XML as end formats. Before the scheduled relaunch, there are some production challenges to overcome: Judaica receives manuscripts as Word Docs. The referencing convention features exclusively footnotes. Additionally, there is ample use of Hebrew script either in-line or as block quotes. This makes any conversion to XML tricky. Our goal is to convert from a standardized input file format (docx) into PDF, HTML and XML. For the XML we chose JATS as standard. We only use open source and open code resources to design this workflow. This lightning talk shows how we • Convert Docx into JATS by using PANDOC • Convert the resulting JATS to PDF by using ConTeXt • Convert JATS to HTML by using XSLT and CSS • Directly feed JATS into the PKP Lens Viewer