The Republic of Korea is the fourth ranking country for the number of PubMed Central (PMC) journals. As of September 2013, 75 journals from Korea are included in PMC. Starting in 2013, several research funding agencies for scholarly journal publications in Korea began to establish open access, full-text databases in the fields of medicine, science, and social sciences and humanities. In those databases, Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) 1.0 is used so that articles written in the Korean language can be easily manipulated as full-text extensible markup language (XML). Editors or publishers must produce full-text XML files based on JATS 1.0. Thus this paper surveys the current state of the application of JATS 1.0 to Korean scholarly journals, including both those in English and those in Korean, focusing on the current technology, training programs, and the policy of the Korean government on open access, full-text XML. This experience in Korea can be a model for constructing mother-tongue, open access, full-text journal databases based on JATS 1.0 in other countries. The usefulness of JATS in scholarly journal publications not only of all fields, but also in all languages, is stressed.