XML 101 for Journal Production Editors

Abstract

MODERATOR: Julie L Nash Senior Partner J&J Editorial, LLC Cary, North Carolina SPEAKERS: Michael Casp Director of Business Development, Production Services Coordinator J&J Editorial, LLC Cary, North Carolina Karie Kirkpatrick Associate Publisher, Digital American Physiological Society Rockville, Maryland REPORTER: Heather DiAngelis Associate Publications Director, Transportation Research Board National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Washington, DC This session provided contextual overview, historical background, and best practice suggestions for XML novices in publishing. Michael Casp, Director of Business Development and Production Services Coordinator at J&J Editorial, began the session with a definition of extensible markup language (XML) and gave basic visual examples of how it is both a human-readable and machine-readable language. This mark-up language is everywhere—even in Microsoft Word. His boiled-down definition was “XML is labels.” He went on to explain various versions of XML document type definitions (DTDs) and various ways to organize them, such as NLM, JATS, and custom DTDs for content management systems. Journal article tag suite (JATS) is the most commonly used DTD for scholarly journal content; it has become the de facto XML standard in the scholarly publishing industry. Casp also discussed how peer review systems such as Editorial Manager collect metadata from authors and editorial staff and then convert them to XML files for transmittal. Afterward, a manuscript document is tagged either before or after copyediting, mostly via automation with human review, to create a new XML file of the text, tables, and metadata; as he noted, almost every item relevant to the […]