Science and Nature are not accepting submissions created by Microsoft Word 2007

Science and Nature are not accepting submissions created by Microsoft Word 2007.  (Thanks to Rob Weir via Slashdot.) 

From Science’s instructions for Word users:

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….

From Nature’s instructions for Word users:

We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.

I like Rob Weir’s advice:

If Science and Nature need to update their templates, then I’d suggest they take a look at ODF [OpenDocument Format]. Not only does it use MathML for equations, but it is an open standard, an ISO standard, a platform and application-neutral standard that has many implementations, including several good open source ones….