Nature Publishing Group (NPG)‘s Chief Technology Officer, Howard Ratner, has posted an update on Nascent (NPG’s web publishing blog) about Microsoft Word 2007 (DOC X) for authors writing for science, technology and medicine (STM) publications.

Howard hosted a meeting on 25 July 2007 at the NPG office in New York for staff from Microsoft, the American Institute of Physics, the American Geophysical Union, Science, Inera (producers of the eXtyles automatic editing tool), Aries (in this context, producers of manuscript tracking systems) and NPG. The publishing participants provided a high-level overview of the various stages involved in a typical journal’s publication process, from the author writing the manuscript, through submission to publication, including a quick overview of the types of software systems and standards used to aid in these workflows. This was then followed up by presentations from Inera and Aries detailing the problems Word 2007 is causing for editing tools and manuscript tracking systems.

In his Nascent post, Howard details some of the outcomes of this fruitful meeting:

—Microsoft will establish a page on one of its websites with more advanced details on how to best use Word 2007 in a publishing environment. (For example, an image of an equation created when saving a Word 2007 file to Word 2003 carries semantic information that can be reused when reopening in Word 2007 file.)

—Microsoft will consider adding text to its help file with Word 2007 especially about its Math Markup Language Support.

—Microsoft will educate publishers by more frequent presentations at publisher events.

Howard also provides links to more information of use to authors, including this summary by Bruce Rosenblum of Inera, and this set of Connotea bookmarks on DOC X , to which you can add.

Nature is currently testing Word 2007 manuscripts in its editorial production system. If you are using Word 2007 and have a sample manuscript (created from scratch in Word 2007) that you can send us, please do so, as an attachment, to the authors’ email address. We are particularly interested in equation-heavy manuscripts, as our experience is that equations and symbols (Greek letters and so on) provide the most stringent test.