Two important scientific journals recently stated that they cannot accept manuscripts written with Microsoft Word 2007, the .docx format: Nature and Science. The .doc format of previous versions of Microsoft Word hasn’t changed for close to 10 years and has become the standard for manuscripts submitted to STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) journals.

The reasons behind this move by Science, Nature and other journals are explained in a post on Nature’s Nascent Blog. Basically, journals have over the years developed workflows around the .doc format. Documents written with Microsoft Word 2007 are not compatible with these workflows in two important areas: equations and special characters.

What does this mean for scientific publishing? There are probably two answers. (1) We are at the beginning of a transition period to the new Microsoft Word format. It will take some time (probably years) until not only the publishing workflows of the journals but also the majority of scientists have moved to the .docx format. (2) This situation creates a window of opportunity for new document formats that might either coexist with .docx or even become a new standard. What are the contenders?

• Publicon Launched by Wolfram Research two years ago, it hasn’t seen a product update since (it’s still at version 1.0.1). A good idea, but most likely a dead product.

• OpenOffice and the OpenDocument format The other Office software. ODF has been adopted by the US state Massachusetts as standard document format. It is important to remember that ODF is supported not only by OpenOffice but also other software such as KOffice.

• Web-based tools such as Google Docs or Zoho Writer Web 2.0 technology now allows fairly sophisticated word processors within your web browser. Not quite as comfortable as your stand-alone word processor, but with one killer feature: collaboration. Almost all scientific publications are written by many authors, sometimes thousands of miles apart. One of the most important aspects of writing a scientific publication is the integration of references, which again are almost all found online. And the publishing workflow (peer review, printing, online publishing) would be much easier with web-based documents.

The most likely scenario is the gradual transition to Microsoft Word 2007. But the best scenario for STM publishers is clearly the last one, simply because it is the cheapest. Price is important for everyone, but expecially so for Open Access publishers that typically charge the author and not the reader. Let’s hope that someone builds the infrastructure for this. Google would be a likely contender as they already have both Google Docs and Google Scholar already in place. Or a publisher such as Public Library of Science picks up the ball.

The Nature Publishing Group started Nature Preceedings, a new preprint and document-sharing service last week. The new service was announced by Timo Hannay in Nature’s Nascent blog, Tim O’Reilly was one of the first to blog this.

Nature Preceedings is a searchable and citable document repository of preprints and presentations. It is very similar to the ArXiv.org service that covers Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology. The main features of Nature Preceedings are:

• The service is free for readers and authors
• All content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License and will be mirrored on other sites
• There is no peer-review, but readers can comment and vote on the released documents
• Papers submitted to a Nature journal can be prepublished on the service

This is a bold move and we wish them good luck. Time will tell whether enough authors are willing to submit their conference presentations, preliminary findings or supplementary material.

The latest issue of the journal Cell (May 4, paid access) has an article by Laura Bonetta entitled Scientists enter the Blogosphere. In her article she describes some of the most popular science blogs and the people behind them.

Blogs are unfamiliar to most scientists

The article is interesting for several reasons. Its main purpose is certainly to introduce the typical reader of the journal Cell (one of the most prestigious journals in the Life Sciences) to the concept of a weblog. Scientists traditionally have been well connected to the internet (remember the days of gopher and usenet?) and have used it for at least 20 years to exchange their ideas with colleagues in different parts of the world. But blogging has been slow to catch on – in sharp contrast to the huge popularity it has quickly gained elsewhere. A few reasons for this obscurity among scientists are obvious, e.g. lack of time, age (most bloggers tend to be younger) and reluctance to talk about unpublished results in public. But blogs are still a fairly new medium and I expect science blogs to become much more widespread over time.

Scientific journals are the traditional source of information

The fact that this article was published in a reputable scientific journal is quite interesting as well. Journals have traditionally been one of the most important sources of information in science (besides scientific meetings and personal communications) and all scientific journals have managed the transition to electronic publishing and online distribution during the past 10-15 years. But the format and business model remained essentially the same. The almost universal access to the internet allows for very different ways of scientific exchange and the traditional journal paper (or talk at a scientific meeting) might not always be the best way of communicating a new scientific finding.

Why peer review is important

Open Access Publishing is one important driving force behind newer journals that take advantage of the new technical possibilities offered by the internet. PLoS ONE takes the idea of Open Access one step further and adds new features: annotations and discussions. These features were obviously stolen from the blogosphere where online comments are an important part of almost all weblogs. But what is stopping scientist of going the whole way and publish their research findings in their weblog? The answer is peer review: without the critical appraisal of your colleagues (or competitors), your scientific work will not be accepted in the community. Since production and distribution of scientific articles have (almost) become commodities in the age of the internet, peer review became the most important asset of science journals – and nobody knows this better than the editors of Cell. Peer review guaranties that scientific articles are interesting. Interestingness translates into revenue for the journal and scientific reputation (and consequently grant money) for the author. Interestingness of a journal is measured by it’s impact factor, which roughly measures how often it’s articles are cited by other journal articles.

Can blogs compete with scientific journals?

The blogosphere works differently. The interestingness of a blog entry is measured by the number of readers, comments and other blog entries that link to it. Because the cost of setting up a weblog is so low, there is no need for peer review. The blogosphere has shown again and again that for news, politics, culture, information technology and other topics their blog entries can compete with peer-reviewed articles in traditional media. Only time will tell whether this also holds true for science.