In late 2015 OUP announced a partnership with Silverchair Information Systems to host its journals and book-based online products.

The new platform accepts books in a flavour of the industry-standard BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite) data model[1].

OUP book content has been captured for many years in a bespoke data model. Before being loaded to the new platform, this content must be converted to BITS. An XSLT script is being written to automate the conversion.

The OUP data model is broadly compatible with BITS, but one major point of difference is the approach taken to modelling bibliographic references. This paper discusses the approaches to modelling references, and the challenges of converting from the OUP format to BITS whilst maintaining the online functionality that the markup supports.