APSCFormat

APSCFormat is an open, vendor-neutral document format specification designed to standardize the layout, metadata, and content structure of scholarly papers and technical documents. Created by the Association for Publishing Standards and Compatibility (APSC), it provides rules for organizing manuscripts, styling, and exchanging documents between authors, editors, and publishers. The format emphasizes machine readability, reproducibility, and accessibility, supporting both human viewing and automated processing.

The specification defines a fixed document skeleton including a title page with authors and affiliations, abstract, keywords, a structured body with sections and subsections, figures and tables with captions and cross-references, equations, and references, plus optional appendices and acknowledgments. It supports multiple content types such as code blocks and data tables, with explicit guidelines for captions, numbering, and placement. References can be rendered in multiple styles via templates, and the format supports exporting to common bibliographic formats and databases.

APSCFormat is designed to be implementation-friendly, offering official templates and reference implementations in several programming languages, as well as converters to LaTeX, Word, HTML, and PDF. It supports machine-readable metadata blocks (for example, author affiliations, ORCID IDs, funding, and ethics statements) to improve indexing and interoperability. Validation tools are provided to check conformance with the schema and style rules, and the format uses a versioned specification to manage updates.

Adoption has grown in academic publishing as an optional submission format and in some conference pipelines. It aims to complement existing styles by providing a common, extensible baseline. Related formats include JATS, LaTeX, and APA-style guidelines.