Top journals Science and Nature will not accept submissions written in Word 2007

It seems that Microsoft has made some changes to the equation editor in Word 2007 that makes documents created with it -- which have the suffix .docx -- unusable by two of the world's most influential scientific journals, Science and Nature.

Even when the documents are saved in older formats by Word 2007, they still don't render the mathematical equations in such a way as to be compatible with systems used by the two journals.

Here's what Science had to say (thanks to itWire for the quote):

"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.

"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 MathType equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word."

I've heard of this .docx -- what are they smoking up there in Redmond? The world is NOT going to start buying Office 2007 en masse just so they can read Microsoft-created documents. I'm pretty sure those days are over. It's just another reason to try the free Open Office and its Open Document Format.