JATS4R is now a NISO recommended practice, and members of our steering committee are currently involved with the JATS Standing Committee, Crossref, Force11, Metadata2020, and STM. Things are changing a lot in our world and we want to ensure that we have input from other organisations so that the best possible recommendations are made available to suit the community’s needs.
We need feedback and input; as little or as much as you can provide:
- The JATS4R website was relaunched in September, and now it contains a roadmap section. Would you be able to help us better understand what our community needs by voting on the importance of the entries that are currently listed?
- If you would like to propose a new recommendation that has not been created or is missing from the roadmap, please suggest a recommendation.
(You will need to login to the site to do these things, but it only takes a second.)
Recommendations often take time to publish. Work goes on beforehand, and lots of people contribute to this – from suggesting a need, to joining a topic-specific subgroup, to making comments on a draft recommendation. We need people (YOU) at all of these stages. Joining or running a subgroup allows you to meet new people, use your creativity, and contribute to and influence the way JATS is used and developed by the publishing community. If you are interested in participating in a particular subgroup, please let us know!
It helps your company, too.
- By contributing, your company will have an opportunity to shape the recommendations.
- The more standardisation there is in usage, the more efficient file exchanges become, and tools and services can be built on top of publishing processes.
With the anticipated release of JATS 1.3, we foresee a lot of interest in updating current recommendations and proposing new ones. In the constantly changing environment in which we work, we want to publish recommendations in a timely manner so that people implementing new initiatives have a reference. For example, the preprint citations recommendation was published early in the Covid pandemic – this was luck rather than design, but it was helpful.
If you are unable to do any of the above, providing feedback on how/if you are using JATS4R recommendations would be great. We all need feedback, and as an organisation made up of volunteers, the knowledge that our time is being spent well and is useful to others helps motivate us to keep going!
We look forward to hearing from you!