Wow, I feel fresh air, although I am not sure whether the following news is a beginning of any deeper changes or not: From Science Authors Guideline: “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.”
Tips: Undernews: SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007
O’Reilly Radar: Science and Nature rejecting Word 2007 Manuscripts
One commenter in Undernews said: “This isn’t just Science and Nature. All Wiley journals now include the instructions: “[Journal] does not accept Microsoft Word 2007 documents at this time. Please use Word’s “Save As” option to save your document as an older (.doc) file type.” So don’t think it’s a singular problem — I’m sure if you visited all the science journal publications, you’d find similar instructions as well.”
What can I say: Prepare for the age of Google Office manuscripts and figures! All you need is a gmail account.
P.S. I made an attempt to coedit my ongoing first author article (desperately waiting for submission) by publishing the draft on Google Docs and adding the coauthors as collaborators, but only one coauthor (a med student) was kind enough to make one little correction this way. The rest is….well the majority of science people are living within the narrow world of Microsoft Office.
