Public Domain XML DTD Describes Standard Content Model for Electronic Archiving and Publishing of Journal Articles

NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) has created two XML DTDs that will simplify electronic journal publishing and increase the accuracy of the archiving and exchange of scholarly journal articles. The Journal Publishing DTD (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/publishing) and the Archiving and Interchange DTD (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov) were both created from the Archiving and Interchange Tagset.

The Publishing DTD defines a common format for the creation of journal content in XML. The Archiving DTD also defines journal articles, but it has a more open structure; it is less strict about required elements and their order. The Archiving DTD defines a target content model for the conversion of any sensibly structured journal article and provides a common format in which publishers, aggregators, and archives can exchange journal content.

The DTDs were created after collaboration between the Harvard University E-Journal Archiving Project and NCBI. This collaboration was inspired by Inera Inc.'s (http://www.inera.com) "E-Journal Archival DTD Feasibility Study" (http://www.diglib.org/preserve/hadtdfs.pdf) . Harvard and Inera's participation was supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Mulberry Technologies (http://www.mulberrytech.com) and Inera examined thousands of articles from hundreds of journals to be sure that the content models being defined were comprehensive. After this extensive modeling, the consultants worked with NCBI to create the Archiving and Interchange DTD, then NCBI and Mulberry created the Journal Publishing DTD to help publishers who had not yet selected a format for their electronic content.

The DTDs may be used as is, or the Tagset can be used to construct other DTDs. These DTDs and the Tagset are in the public domain. Complete information and documentation can be found at http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov.

The NCBI contact for the DTDs is Jeff Beck (telephone 301-435-5992; fax 301-480- 0109).

Last updated: 13 July 2004
First published: 02 June 2003
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