There was an interesting article at ZDnet today on QuickOffice
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39290063,00.htm
Scrap that, the article wasn't so interesting, what was interesting was the comment by the chief executive at the end.
“Asked whether Quickoffice would at any point support OpenOffice's .odf format, a rival to .xml, the company's vice president of product management, Paul Moreton, claimed there "has not been a whole lot of demand" because, he suggested, most OpenOffice users saved their documents in a Microsoft format anyway.”
Now this is something that really irritates me. I work in a scientific environment, and the company as a whole is in the process of moving away from proprietary software to Open Source software. Our desktops will be moving onto Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/), our word processing package will be OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/), and as far as possible all software will be open source. Now, this is a very exciting move for me as a biological scientist. Most of the software I use has very good open source options, and much of the software has only been available on linux platforms. As such I have learnt a lot about linux in the last few years. Other people are not so excited and are incredibly sceptical; one of the biggests reasons for the scepticism is the need to publish.
A lot of journals are moving towards the open acess model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access), however a significant proportion, particularly in the Chemistry realm are not. Invariably, all of these journals require submission in a proprietary format be it .doc or .pdf. This includes the Open Acess journals. I've emailed journals asking them whether they will consider submissions that come in .odf format, and the answer is always no, because we can convert to .doc. Quite frankly that isn't good enough. I want to be free to chose what software I use, to use the best software for the job, not to have to worry whether conversion errors are going to ruin my manuscript and hence my chances of publishing, and to be able to submit in an open format, that I know I will be able to access in ten, twenty or fifty years time. Relatedly, it puts an additional burden on scientists in third world countries. Why should they have to purchase expensive software to publish, when there is a suitable alternative that is far more cost effective. The open access journals will not be truly open until they realise this.
No comments:
Post a Comment