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.
Purpose Data papers are a promising genre of scholarly communication, in which research data are described, shared, and published. Rich documentation of data, including adequate contextual information, enhances the potential of data reuse. This study investigated the extent to which the components of data papers specified by journals represented the types of contextual information necessary for data reuse.
Methods A content analysis of 15 data paper templates/guidelines from 24 data journals indexed by the Web of Science was performed. A coding scheme was developed based on previous studies, consisting of four categories: general data set properties, data production information, repository information, and reuse information.
Results Only a few types of contextual information were commonly requested by the journals. Except data format information and file names, general data set properties were specified less often than other categories of contextual information. Researchers were frequently asked to provide data production information, such as information on the data collection, data producer, and related project. Repository information focused on data identifiers, while information about repository reputation and curation practices was rarely requested. Reuse information mostly involved advice on the reuse of data and terms of use.
Conclusion These findings imply that data journals should provide a more standardized set of data paper components to inform reusers of relevant contextual information in a consistent manner. Information about repository reputation and curation could also be provided by data journals to complement the repository information provided by the authors of data papers and to help researchers evaluate the reusability of data.
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