Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format

hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."

Comments

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.

In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.

If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)

I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.

RTFA, please

[shis-ka-bob]

The point is that they did try and it turns out that Word 2007 screws up the math, even if you save the results in Office 2003 formats. As it turns out, mathematics is the language of Science and Nature. So, while many of us can go thought life without ever writing a contour integral, most of us will never be published in Science or Nature either (the closest I got was Physical Review Letters). Unless you want to assure us that you can handle complex math expressions with you free patches, I would suggest that you have a bit more respect for the staff of Science and Nature. They are reacting to a observed problem. I'll bet you that they tried the free patches before they decided to warn scientists all over the world about submitting articles using Word 2007.