Manuscript Exchange Common Approach and Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) compatibility: a case study utilizing the JATS Compatibility Meta Model

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) project is a cross-organization industry initiative to develop a common approach to manuscript transfer that can be adopted across the scholarly publishing industry. MECA establishes a vocabulary set that includes transfer, review, and manifest models. These models are designed to work with different article XML schemas, including the latest NISO Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) standard (v1.2). In order to avoid conflicts between these project vocabularies and the JATS, we reviewed the MECA vocabularies against the NISO JATS Compatibility Meta Model (v0.7). This paper describes the review and analysis of the MECA schemas against the JATS Meta Model, how we documented the analysis, and the recommendations we made to resolve issues revealed by the analysis. It includes the documentation we produced to communicate the results of the analysis and what actions we took to move forward with the project, including both changes to the schemas and requests for changes in the JATS. We hope sharing our experiences with this process will help others who are trying to do the same.