The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) recently announced the publication of its newest standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.105-2023, Content Profile/Linked Document (CP/LD), which enables portions of content, data, semantics, and other resources from separate sources to be combined into a single, standards-based format optimized for interchange, search, and display.
For most disciplines, the journal article remains the primary means of communicating the outputs of scholarly research. As a result, publishing workflows and systems as well as the information standards supporting them have been largely based on large XML document models. Increasingly, however, users also expect to access articles and associated content—e.g., research data, semantics, code, models, and images—in smaller, arbitrary portions or "chunks."
The CP/LD Standard addresses this growing need by providing flexible instructions for linking and combining academic, research, and professional content, data, and semantics in a single package. It defines a machine-readable, self-describing, standards-based markup format that can be used to exchange data between systems, APIs, and services. The new standard advances scholarly research by enabling users to engage with a specific portion of the content at the appropriate time in the research lifecycle, including prior to publication. CP/LD does not replace existing models and standards—e.g., ANSI/NISO Z39.96, Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS)—used for articles, books, data sets, or semantic and metadata schemes, but rather complements them.
The NISO Content Profile/Linked Document standard is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/cpld.
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