How to Convert Journal Articles from Word to JATS XML with Python

How to Convert Journal Articles from Word to JATS XML with Python If you've ever spent hours manually converting Word documents to XML for scholarly journals, you know the frustration. The process is tedious, error-prone, and eats up valuable development time. As academic publishers grow, the need to automate this workflow becomes more urgent — especially when handling dozens or hundreds of articles at once. The Manual Way (And Why It Breaks) Most developers who work with academic publishing tools end up doing this by hand. They open each .docx file, copy-paste content into a templating system, and painstakingly format equations, citations, and figures to match journal requirements. Some even build spreadsheets to track metadata or use third-party tools that only support one output format at a time. The result is a slow, inconsistent pipeline — and constant risk of human error. Worse still, when working with Open Journal Systems (OJS), you're often required to export to JATS XML, a str