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

Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh, strange that Science and Nature are using a standard text editor format at all. You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose(based on my experiences on writing math on computers).

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[porcupine8]

Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

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.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ajanp]

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it should be clarified what file formats are and aren't allowed currently at Nature and Science since it seems like there is a lot of conflicting information.

Nature: http://npg.nature.com/nature/submit/finalsubmissio n/SI/index.html
# MS Word document (.doc) (preferred)
# Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
# Plain ASCII text (.txt)
# Rich Text Format (.rtf)
# WordPerfect document (.wpd)
# PostScript (.ps)
# Encapsulated postcript (.eps)
# HTML document (.htm)
# MS Excel spreadsheet (.xls)
# GIF image (.gif)
# JPEG image (.jpg)
# TIFF image (.tif)
# MS PowerPoint slide (.ppt)
# QuickTime movie (.mov) (preferred)
# Flash movie (.swf)
# Audio file (.wav)
# MPEG/MPG animation (.mpg)

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/prep_ init.dtl
* .pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format)
* .ps (PostScript)
* .eps (Encapsulated PostScript)
* .prn (Printer file for a PostScript printer)
* .doc (Microsoft Word, version 6.0 and higher) -- note that we cannot accept files in Word 2007 (.docx) format, as explained here.
* .wpd (WordPerfect, version 7.0 and higher)

Science also specifically makes a point to mention:

Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead.

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. So as you can see,

Also, FTA, the reason that Word 2007 isn't being accepted is:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML.

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.