Article metadata standards: an historical review

It has been 20 years since the first commercial application of SGML was launched by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for its Electronic Manuscript Project. Defining an SGML representation for journal articles was one of the project’s objectives. Since then a series of attempts have been made to develop standards for the publishing industry to encode article content and metadata. This article traces the development of these SGML and XML‐based standards.