About the use of identifyType by the JATS plugin

[mhvezina]

Regarding this instruction :
For each of your journal’s sections, the “Identify items published in this section as a(n)…” field is set to one of the suggested JATS article-type values. Please note that “research-article” is used only for peer-reviewed research. If you are unsure how to identify the items in the section, “other” is acceptable. https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/coalition-publica/en/initial-setup

Meaning that the identifyType field is used to provide content for the article-type attribute of the article element, following the specific vocabulary advised by JATS.

Was this field/metadata originally intended for such use (i.e. JATS output)? I doubt it, since the input instructions suggest quite different example contents: (For example, "Peer-reviewed Article", "Non-refereed Book Review", "Invited Commentary", etc.).

I must say I am unsure of the purpose of the identifyType, as, to my experience, it is not shown to the author-depositor nor is it displayed in the summary/toc for issues... I can see however that it is used by the Sword deposit plugin (https://github.com/pkp/sword/blob/84ec9fd8fbc9083c7322c6876caee5a6c91aa486/classes/PKPSwordDeposit.inc.php#L81) and the RFC1807 metadata format plugin (https://github.com/pkp/ojs/tree/main/plugins/oaiMetadataFormats/rfc1807).

Moreover the JATS template plugin seems to call for a localized version of the IdentifyType.
https://github.com/pkp/jatsTemplate/blob/main/JatsTemplatePlugin.php#L104
Which make no sense, as the actual JATS vocabulary is only in English (if I'm not wrong).

Shoudn't the JATS plugin make use of a specific/reserved field in the form for sections, following what the openAIRE plugin (https://github.com/ojsde/openAIRE) does (with a list of accepted values in the drop-down menu)? :

Or... could this IdentifyType officialy "rebranded" into a JATS article type field? Hence the default instruction/hint for the input could be something like "use JATS article-type values as stated here : https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/publishing/tag-library/1.3/attribute/article-type.html"

[asmecher]

@mhvezina, the support forum is a better place to ask questions like this, so I'll split the difference -- close this issue, and answer the question at the same time. :)

The "Identify Type" field is currently only used by the OJS MARC/MARCXML OAI-PMH plugin, field 655, subfield "Genre/form data or focus term". It might be an improvement to have the JATS plugin augment the section settings form with a drop-down selector, but it's a niche use, so we're unlikely to prioritize it. If you do encounter a "collision" where the field is needing to be used for two things at once, that would be helpful to identify.