It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.And here I thought maybe they were rejecting Word entirely. Ah, it could happen. Most papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science journals are already formatted in TeX, if I'm not mistaken. So there is some diversity in publishing software; it's not all a monoculture."Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science."— SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007, by Rob Weir, Rob Weir Blog, Thursday, May 31, 2007
Meanwhile, the main reason Science rejected Word 2007 is that it is not backwards compatible with previous versions of Word, thus illustrating the Microsoft dilemma: stick with the old and retain customers, or fix problems and lose some. Not so big a dilemma with Word, perhaps. How many submittors to Science are there, as compared with business Word users? But much more of a problem for security fixes that require breaking backwards compatibility.
-jsq
Just to clarify, Science and Nature's authoring guidelines only have a problem with Word 2007's new equation feature, not the Equation Editor that is included with earlier versions of Word as well as with Word 2007. Equation Editor is my company's (Design Science) product that we have licensed to Microsoft since 1991 and is a simplified version of our MathType product. Documents containing equations created with either Equation Editor or MathType, even ones in Word 2007's docx format should be acceptable to publishers as they can use Word 2007's ability to save to the old .doc format to get such documents into their workflow. Of course, an author should consult with the publisher to be sure. We have issued a press release that gives more details here: http://www.dessci.com/en/company/press/releases/070622.htm.
Paul Topping
President & CEO
Design Science
Posted by: Paul Topping | June 22, 2007 at 03:42 PM