The Journal Article Tag Suite (hereafter JATS) is an ANSI/NISO standard (JATS version 1.4 ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2025) designed to capture the content and metadata of journal articles. JATS is only a tag set, unlike TEI, DITA, and Akoma Ntoso, which provide extensive software/processing components. JATS provides semantic tags for the parts of journals (particularly in the metadata) that have traditionally been used for discovery and to manage journal articles. The JATS tagging for body structures is quite generic (paragraphs, tables, figures, lists, footnotes, etc.). The metadata and bibliographic elements are typically semantic and divide many elements into logical components (for example: multiple parts of a personal name, extensive information on collaborations, elaborate article funding metadata, and over 60 elements within a bibliographic citation).

Journal articles are not typically authored in JATS: they may be, for example, written in Microsoft Word or encoded in a bespoke journal article tag set. But at some stage in their lifecycle nearly all the world's journal articles are translated into JATS. JATS is the tag set publishers and archives use to communicate and exchange; JATS can be input to a wide variety of hosting platforms; JATS is the archival format of choice for many large-scale archives such as PubMed Central, UK PubMed Central, JSTOR, the British National Library, the Australian National Library, and the US Library of Congress. JATS is international; in 2018 it was used in more than 30 countries, and that number grows over time.