NISO’s content profile/linked document standard: A research communication format for today’s scholarly ecosystem

This paper is based upon the author’s presentation at the 2023 NISO Plus Conference in which he discussed the purpose and importance of the NISO Content Profile/ Linked Document standard. The need for the standard is obvious: users demand the delivery of contextualized, targeted content delivered as a natural part of their workflow and publishers aspire to produce machine-actionable FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) materials, but many publishing workflows are complicated in order to enable print and digital outputs. This standard is an application of HTML5 and JSON-LD to create semantic relationships between data elements in scholarly publishing workflows and express machine actionable content, to ease reuse and interchange of scholarly research information. The format description defines a set of rules that outline the minimal characteristics of documents (Linked Documents) that conform to the standard and a mechanism to define more detailed Content Profiles that extend and refine the rules for specific use cases.