Leaving Bethesda

As the Editor-in-Chief of JPIS, I cannot stress enough the importance of the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) markup language, even if it may be new to our readers, authors, and reviewers. JATS is an XML format used to encode scientific literature for online publication. It functions as a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the United States and has been approved by the American National Standards Institute. This NISO project is a reflection of a long-term endeavor of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), known for their oversight of PubMed Central, one of the major research databases that archive publicly accessible full-text scholarly articles. As the significance of JATS grows, JATS-Con, a conference held annually by the NLM in Bethesda, MD, USA, has been drawing a great deal of attention from not only the employees of NLM, but also many groups of librarians and scientific journal publishers from around the world. The conference provides updates on the recent development of JATS and facilitates the discussion of ongoing JATS development. I was pleased to join the other international stakeholders who participated in JATS-Con 2016, held on April 12-13. The conference featured a number of insightful talks from renowned speakers representing many nations To name a few, Mr. Alexander B. Schwarzman and his colleagues from the Optical Society (OSA)—a publisher of 17 scholarly journals—discussed the publisher's solution for identifying and standardizing funding information in scholarly articles, and Mr. Franziska Bühring and his colleagues, representing De Gruyter in Germany, an academic publisher of scientific content for over 260 years, introduced a quality assurance tool for JATS using the Schematron language. Mr. Chandi Perera of Typefi Systems addressed challenges in implementing a multilingual JATS publishing workflow and suggested that it is important to select the appropriate tools and resources. In August 2015, NISO called for participation in the development of the NISO Standard Tag Set (STS), a standard XML tag set for the publication of standards. Through JATS-Con 2016, I recognized the coordinated development of STS among relevant organizations from the talk delivered by Mr. Robert Wheeler from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and identified an overview and updates on the NISO STS project from Mr. Bruce Rosenblum, who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to those who have attended past …