entry2.md

title: "Single Source Publishing and JATS" 
date: "2021-11-27"
intro: In general, Journals (and many of the family of workflows associated with publishing research) require 3 output types – HTML, PDF, and JATS. Along with finding reviewers, this requirement for…
author: Adam Hyde
tags: featured
class: 
icon: "/images/uploads/kotahi-jats-V2-500x500.jpg"

In general, Journals (and many of the family of workflows associated with publishing research) require 3 output types – HTML, PDF, and JATS.

Along with finding reviewers, this requirement for document preparation (generally called typesetting) is one of the big publishing bottlenecks. The tooling and processes for typesetting can be complex so it is also difficult for Journal staff to do this themselves. The result is that many ‘throw it over the wall’ to an outsourced vendor. This incurs costs which may or may not be affordable for the Journal. The back and forth with vendors also prolongs the time to publish. In addition, conversion costs are added to the total cost of production and passed along, sooner or later, to subscribing institutions (such as universities), funders, or the researchers (in the case of Open Access via Article Processing Charges).

So, there is a lot to be gained by solving this problem. Solve this problem and research can be shared sooner, and the cost of publication can be significantly lowered. The impact of typesetting on the speed and cost of publication is under-discussed – perhaps because it is a rather specialist domain and has been, for some time, difficult to explain and, frankly, if you are not into document conversion the whole thing can feel rather difficult to grasp, and perhaps also rather boring.

Yet meeting this requirement is a real and significant problem for the speed and cost of publication of research.

At Coko we have been working on this matter for some time (5 years +). We have built several tools that help us along this way – namely XSweet, Wax, and Pagedjs. These technologies put easy- to-use tools in the hands of Journal staff to produce HTML and (beautiful) PDF at (almost) the press of a button.

However, outputting HTML and PDF is not enough if you cannot also output JATS. If you can’t output JATS, the journal staff still have to solve this problem, and if it means sending the content to a vendor to do so, then, dependent on the workflow of the vendor, you might as well ask them to produce all three document types. More often than not, it doesn’t make sense to just do JATS.

So, finally (finally!) Coko has been working on an easy-to-use tool to produce JATS at (almost!) the press of a button. This is our newly released WAX-JATS editor.

The WAX-JATS editor (pictured above) is currently integrated into Kotahi and is very easy to use. No specialist JATS knowledge is required.

The following short series of articles will look at the problem, some of the previous solutions, and discuss how the new WAX-JATS software addresses this issue.