Courtesy of Undernews (thanks to Adam Witwer for passing along the link), it seems that both Nature and Science won’t accept manuscripts authored in Word 2007. This validates the experience we’ve been seeing here at O’Reilly, with unexpected inconsistencies and issues arising in Word 2007 that are far more pernicious and difficult to diagnose than what we’d seen in previous release transitions. Especially troublesome for those science publications is the issue of equations:
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.
I’ve been fairly intimate with previous versions of Word, and this doesn’t really surprise me.
What will be interesting to see is whether publications like Nature and Science choose to modify their workflow to accommodate the changes, or take this as an opportunity to build a workflow around another, more open and predictable format. I expect both the micro and macro issues this raises to be topics of discussion among participants at O’Reilly’s upcoming Tools of Change for Publishing conference.