Balisage Paper: The Future Begins Tomorrow: Succession Planning for XML Infrastructure Resources
Jeffrey Beck
Program Head for Literature
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
Jeff Beck is the Program Head for Literature at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.
Abstract
Much of the world’s scholarship, including most of the world’s scientific, technical, engineering, and medical discoveries, are published in journal articles. Journal publishing has changed rapidly and dramatically in the last 25 years. Current journal article publishing (both print and online), archiving, and interchange is done in XML using JATS (the Journal Article Tag Suite). JATS is supported and maintained by a NISO Standing Committee and a group of (aging) volunteers. How long can this work be supported by volunteers on standards committees? New technologies may transform journal modeling and related tasks but will not replace the work of skilled practitioners. I see document modeling work becoming a function of libraries. Libraries should support shared standards and document models, including training, tool creation, and documentation. Just as libraries store and preserve physical journals published when scholarship was ink on paper, their cultural heritage preservation role must expand to support the creation and preservation of XML journal articles.