Every Rogue Scholar blog post now also available in JATS XML format

On Monday the Rogue Scholar science blog archive added support for exporting the blog posts in various formats: markdown, ePub, and PDF. Today I am adding another export format: JATS XML, the standard format for scholarly articles. JATS is again automatically generated with the Pandoc universal document converter, with some initial tweaks of the Rogue Scholar metadata.

Rogue Scholar Search now displays several output options for each of the currently 13,301 science blog posts:

Similar to the ePub and PDF formats, this is an initial version of JATS XML, expect to see improvements in the next three months.

The blog posts in markdown, ePub, PDF, and JATS XML formats are available via the Rogue Scholar API, either fetched from the search index (markdown), or generated on the fly (ePub, PDF, JATS XML) from the markdown format. To make automated machine access easier, I have also started to update the DOI metadata, which now include links to these full-text versions (it will take a few weeks to update all 10K+ metadata records). This will hopefully simplify the discovery of these output formats, e.g. the Find available PDF functionality in the reference manager Zotero.

There is a lot more work needed to improve these output formats, and all help from the Rogue Scholar community is greatly appreciated. PDF is generated with the help of the Weasyprint open source library and currently uses the Pandoc default template and CSS. ePub and JATS XML are generated from Pandoc without additional tools, but allow a great deal of customization via Pandoc templates, CSS, and Lua or Python filters.

Pandoc JATS XML support has a special place in my heart, as I wrote a Pandoc custom writer in Lua 10 years ago that helped adding JATS support to the main Pandoc application (added in Pandoc 2.0 October 2017).

Finally, the addition of JATS XML support again demonstrates that scholar publishing doesn't have to be complicated, expensive, or take forever.

References

Fenner, M. (2024). Every Rogue Scholar blog post now available in Markdown, ePub, and PDF formats. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/1dfxr-hs665

Fenner, M. (2013). From Markdown to JATS XML in one Step. https://doi.org/10.53731/r294649-6f79289-8cw0k