My frustrations for the day – I’m co-author on a manuscript submitted to PLoS. We’re now trying to upload the final version but we’re hitting silly problems that are caused by PLoS seemingly being beholden to Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Isn’t insisting on using proprietary formats that can’t be used on open source platforms providing “unnecessary barriers to immediate availability, access, and use of research”? It’s not difficult to fix – simply insist on openly available fonts like Helvetica. My frustrations for the day – I’m co-author on a manuscript submitted to PLoS. We’re now trying to upload the final version but we’re hitting silly problems that are caused by PLoS seemingly being beholden to Microsoft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aaaaaagh","category-science-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe originate because I use Linux whilst my colleagues use Macs and Windows, so I use OpenOffice, rather than Word. There are minor problems caused by this: equations aren’t editable and references get screwed up (I assume because my colleagues are using EndNote: I haven’t tried it but I suspect we would have similar problems if I used Mendeley). Things would be much simpler if Word used an open format, but Word’s compatibility problems are so bad it’s not even compatible with different versions of itself.
\nThe alternatives to Word docs are rtf and LaTeX. rtf<\/a> is another format owned by Microsoft. At least it has a publicly available specification, even if this does keep on on changing. And fun as it would be for me, I can’t see me persuading my co-authors to start using LaTeX.
\nAnyway, we managed to work our way around those problems only to be hit with a new one. PLoS insist that figures are only submitted as tiffs or eps. Now, tiffs are big files and as the figures are all graphs, a vector-based format like eps is perfect: it doesn’t lose resolution as you change its size. And R, of course, happily makes postscript files.
\nSo, I made the graphs and sent them off. But then we hit the next problem – PLoS insist that we use Arial<\/a> as a font. I didn’t know this but Arial is a proprietary font developed for Microsoft, and which they only release for Windows and Mac. So, I can’t use the font because I prefer to use an open source OS, which PLoS doesn’t like.
\nOne nice thing about Postscript is that it’s actually a text-based format. So I can open up the file in a text editor and see this:
\n%!PS-Adobe-3.0
\n%%DocumentNeededResources: font Helvetica
\n%%+ font Helvetica-Bold
\n%%+ font Helvetica-Oblique
\n%%+ font Helvetica-BoldOblique
\n%%+ font Symbol
\n%%+ font Helvetica
\n%%+ font Helvetica-Bold
\n%%+ font Helvetica-Oblique
\n%%+ font Helvetica-BoldOblique
\n%%+ font Symbol
\n%%DocumentMedia: special 504 360 0 () ()
\n%%Title: R Graphics Output
\n%%Creator: R Software
\n%%Pages: (atend)
\n%%BoundingBox: 0 0 504 360
\n%%EndComments<\/code>
\nSimply replacing ‘Helvetica’ with ‘Arial’ might work (“might” because I don’t know if the fonts have to be embedded), so I suspect a small piece of code at PLoS’s end would fix it (in fairness it would probably have to be added to an already long to-do list). But should I really be having these problems? Shouldn’t PLoS be trying to help us? After all their core objectives are<\/a><\/p>\n\n
\nThere’s a lot of shouting in the Open Access community about how the big publishers have a monopoly<\/a> (together the three biggest publishers own a bit less than 45% of journals – what does ‘monopoly’ mean, boys and girls?). And yet here is PLoS forcing us to use Microsoft products. Why isn’t anyone asking for the use of open standards in publishing?
\nOf course, the best solution is to persuade the academic world to use LaTeX. If you don’t fancy the typesetting equivalent of scrambling around on your hands and knees, you can always use LyX<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"