In a post entitled Nascent: Word 2007 and the STM Publisher Ecosystem, Howard Ratner, Chief Technical Officer of Nature Publishing Group, writes about how he has become involved in “a very lively conversation with Microsoft staff about why Word 2007 is not being actively endorsed by STM publishers. It has recently come to Microsoft’s attention that ”https://www.nature.com/nature/authors/submissions/template/index.html “>Nature , ”https://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx.dtl">Science and many other scholarly publishers do not accept files from authors in Word 2007. Both Science and Nature Publishing Group have been in correspondence with Microsoft staff on this important issue. The staff there have been very willing to engage in this conversation."

The rest of Howard’s Nascent post is the text of a letter to Microsoft by Bruce Rosebaum of Inera, which well explains the issues for science and technical publishers attempting to integrate this format with their typesetting and web coding systems. The letter concludes: “Those of us in the scientific community look forward to a dialog to articulate scholarly publishing requirements to Microsoft so that Microsoft can provide products that serve the needs of the entire scholarly community.”

James McQuat, London Nature journals’ Editorial Production Director, draws attention to an article by Margaret Heffernan at The Huffington Post, one of the world’s most popular blogs, on this issue. It is a much more upfront analysis of the situation, but encapsulates it well.

In a comment to the Nascent post, Bruce D’Arcus writes: “There’s another issue with backwards compatibility for scholarly workflows. Word 2007 supports new citation and bibliography fields. But if you open such files in previous versions of Word, the fields are converted to plain text. This means scholarly collaboration becomes impossible unless all parties are using Word 2007. I’m sure MS thought this a smart business decision, but I beg to differ. I think it’ll mean many scholar won’t bother with Word 2007, or its citation features.”