SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007
ROB WEIR BLOG - 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.
"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."
Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news:
"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. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word."
Nature appears to have the same problem:
"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs."
Reuse of existing standards is important. When you reuse a standard, you are reusing more than a piece of paper. You are reusing the experience and effort that went into creating and reviewing that standard. You are reusing the experience gathered by those who have already implemented the standard. You are reusing the books and training materials already written for that standard. You are reusing the interfaces for other technologies that have already integrated with that standard or can produce or consume output that conforms to that standard. . .
32 Comments:
physicists, mathematicians, and computer "fake" scientists uses latex. We just grab a predefined style file and go.
Lyx, baby!
http://www.lyx.org/
Funny how LaTeX was invented by a 'computer "fake" scientist'.
Asshole.
As far as I know, no journals accept Word documents. PDFs are, and have been for quite some time, the standard manuscript submission format.
funny how anonymous "Asshole" commenter lacks a sense of irony.
This post has been removed by the author.
More sensationalist storytelling posing as "news"...
The tone of the article is that of a continuing uprising against the tyranny of Microsoft, when all this says is that Science and Nature have not upgraded to Word 2007 yet and don't have the ability to read the new 2007 .docx file format. Word 2007 can save files in standard .doc format that is readable by any previous Word version, this is a complete non-issue by someone with an anti-MS ax to grind.
As the previous poster said, this is just some sensationalism masquerading as news. What's funny is that many people complained that the Word ".doc" format was a closed standard. So, Microsoft developed the open standard ".docx" for Word 2007 and this post states, "Reuse of existing standards is important."
Sounds to me like Science and Nature just need to upgrade their workflows to handle a new format. No big deal.
The original use of the word irony by feedmashr is actually quite right:
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/irony
Check out sense 2 b.
No big deal? If it was just an update to their workflow, don't you think they could have accommodated that by now? Both journals cite an inability to _edit_ equations in the new format. I'd call that a fairly big deal.
Can't we all just get along?
What is this, Youtube?
Seriously, I would rather suffer through the comments on Digg than see this kind of bile being hoisted upon random 'anonymous' surfers. People like you turds are the reason the internet is going to look like rest-stop bathroom-stalls, lame graffiti, empty bravado and occasional promises of discreet sexual encounters.
That being said, is this just a case of someone trying to view certain policies as anti-Microsoft?
As the previous poster said, this is just some sensationalism masquerading as news.
The author is just pointing out what you are already saying - that some users have to (yet again) upgrade their own workflows to compensate for Microsoft's constant evasion of the use of a standard (even their own de-facto standards).
There is nothing to denounce here, folks. This is Blogger, not the BBC. Why don't you crawl back to Reddit and move onto the next lolcat-related article?
For those stating that this isn't a problem and you should just convert into an earlier format...Did you even read the article?
"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. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft
Word."
Sounds to me this is a legitimate gripe. I hope your getting a check from the Microsoft PR department.
This is all because you failed to take the Word of God in your hearts.
Sinful people.
/humour
All that aside, I'm baffled at this. Especially since I was reading not 4 years ago, some Microsoft article/dude/blog enthousiastically exclaiming how cool the word format was because it was designed with forward compatibility in mind (what with container areas etc...) It took *one* release to break that? Bravo.
I guess like Hollywood (wrt Copyright), Redmond has a different concept of eternity.
Hi all,
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
Its like Microsoft forgot about proficient/advanced users and designed it with beginners/morons in mind!
Ive been using it for a couple of months and till now find my self looking for things i used to know where they are..
plus...i cant convert to pdf anymore! why, why Microsoft!!!!
This is GOOD news, is the anti-Microsoft view. I don't know how some commenters think that this article is anti-Microsoft. By spinning this as bad news, the article is totally and disappointingly PRO Microsoft.
The more users of LaTex, the better.
The fewer users getting locked into proprietary, consumer-unfriendly, non-interoperable, latest versions of Microsoft tools, the better.
Apparently, Nature, Science, and all you geniuses don't know about the Office 2007 backwards compatibility pack that allows Word 2003 to read Word 2007 formats.
http://www.softwarepatch.com/office/office-2007-file-compatibility-pack.html
Word is not a standard nor ever will be. It is proprietary and frankly just not very good. As an earlier poster pointed out all scientific publications are done in LateX (yes all of them, the ones that try and get away with Ms Equation Editor etc soon find themselves getting beaten into using TeX in one form or another), and then often republished as PDF or raw PS, and with the advent of Lyx there is no excuse anymore.
This whole thing about such things being 'anti-Microsoft' (even though I fully support them if they are), is similar to arguments which try to put atheism on the same plane as beliefs in nonexistant superbeings. There are standards and they exist for good reasons. Non-standard proprietary 'options' - and this includes all manufacturers including Word Perfect etc - are always at risk of being rejected and have to either live with it or start using open formats such as OpenDoc.
One always wonder why is it that Microsoft (and here I don't mean to continue the troll anti or pro-MS, just stating a fact) seems to play alone in its sandbox, by developing its own standards and by not grouping with others (like W3C) to ameliorate the already existing standards. Of course, OOXML, the format for Office 2007 is supposedly open, but what it really means, it's that developers and scientists who've been working with LaTeX and MathML for the last years will lose their edge by having to learn a new incompatible standard. While having understood the importance of "open format" to gain new market shares, Microsoft is just plainly arm-wrestling with other organizations, like Sun and the W3C. I, on a personal level, quite frankly, approve of those decisions to refuse Word 2007 docs, for there is no anti-ms bias here, but just old good scientific attitude toward real open knowledge sharing.
Consider for a moment the environment of a magazine or publishing house...
You have a large pool of independent professionals that are part of your editorial and peer-review group. Many of these outside professionals work for large organizations that enforce centralized control over their workstations for security & system management reasons. You have little or no control over their computers or the software they use.
Internally, you have complex document management systems that are integral to your business.
You have dozens of third party utilities that provide version control, difference analysis, translation, proofing, collaboration and workflow management.
You have complex graphic design, page layout, and imagesetting packages that must import content.
The Office 2007 XML-based formats will break most of these systems. Fixing the problem is a very big deal, indeed!
As the article hinted, having contributors save in down-level Office 97-2003 format breaks scientific notation, equations, and some vector OLE drawings. That's a show stopper for most technical journals.
Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack also has several stumbling blocks. It isn't available for the Mac platform. It only works with Office 2000/XP/2003. It installs the Office 2007 document rendering engine without a viable patching mechanism, so future Office exploits are a very real concern.
While Microsoft is claiming that Office 2007 is an "open standard", the licensing terms are fairly restrictive and incompatible with most open source licenses. Given that MS is now claiming patent infringement by packages like Office Office, Think Free, and Linux, it's difficult to take such "openness" seriously.
Apparently, Nature, Science, and all you geniuses don't know about the Office 2007 backwards compatibility pack that allows Word 2003 to read Word 2007 formats.
Well who said word 2007 can not b read by word 2003. It is the editing which is really important. do not talk like an idiot with out knowing what the real issue is. Nobel laureates and highly educated people who are changing the world publish in Science and nature. they are much more knowledgeable than yourself. if that is so simple they would have found out the solution by now.
The claimed "openstandard" doesn't have a Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and OS X viewer. Yes even viewer,forget editing anything.
Linux and especially Solaris are very heavily used in scientific environments, OS X is almost standard in large DTP.
An open standard these days should have at least GTK/Motif/QT whatever based X11 client. That is _minimum_ for scientific environments.
While Word 2007 can save in .doc format, equations get turned into useless pictures that can't be effectively processed further in publishing workflows. The mathematical representation is embedded somehow as one can convert such .doc files back to .docx with no loss of fidelity.
If the journals change their internal processes to accommodate a new file format, it would make sense to adopt an open standard like the ISO-approved ODT standard. This would let authors use whatever word processor they like, as long as it supports ODT output. It would also mean the journal could join the body controlling the standard (that's part of ODT being an open standard) and so influence its future direction.
If they just change the process to support a new proprietary format, nobody is any further ahead. Alternatively, as other people have suggested, use LaTeX.
I believe there is a third party plug-in available to add ODT support to Microsoft Word. So far, Microsoft refuses to support it natively, citing lack of customer demand. If journals such as Science add their weight to using open standards, that will add a bit more pressure on vendors to improve the interoperability of their products.
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/070622.htm.
Paul Topping
President & CEO
Design Science
I don't know if this was previously written, but Microsoft Equation 3.0 (the one used in Word 97-2003) is still available in Word 2007.
Here are it's directions: Insert -> Object (it's a small box in the text section) -> Microsoft Equation 3.0 -> OK.
I may hate Microsoft, but they have the good sense to at least include the old version of their equation editor.
There is also the fact that you can easily get a great free PDF add-on throught the main menu of the program that should preserve content. If you are wondering about PowerPoint for presentations, just convert it to PDF and there shouldn't be a computer out there that can't read your presentation.
Cheers,
Cevs
MS equation 3.0 does not seem to be an alternative either given that I have suffered endless loss of my equations.
Thanks for article!
Thanks for interesting article.
Glad to read articles like this. Thanks to author!
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