I have to say, the underlying paper scares me a bit. It seems to be pretty heavy on research politics, driven by a very limited study, and the authors do not ev

I have to say, the underlying paper scares me a bit. It seems to be pretty heavy on research politics, driven by a very limited study, and the authors do not even seem to grasp the mechanics that underlie the generation of computer documents very well. Example: "In all other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format. We believe that this would be a good policy for two reasons. First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public." I am honestly not sure how they think accepting papers in PDF format would prevent researchers "from producing documents in LaTeX". Do they really not know that not only can you generate PDF from LaTeX, but that that is what is commonly being done? Second, do they really not understand that there are options other than Word or LaTeX? I know of quite a few people who use Pandoc (Markdown + some inline LaTeX for when you need equations/references) [1]. Others use a non-Word word processor (e.g. because they're running on Linux). Others again use LyX. This casts doubt upon their ability to make policy recommendations when their understanding of the available toolset is incomplete. Third, the study seems to be awfully limited. In at least my field (computer science) tables and figures are often automatically generated from the data using scripts so as to avoid errors transcribing the data manually, so I personally don't really care how easy it is to type in a table by hand. How about long documents (e.g. a journal paper) broken down into multiple files? How do the various approaches compare for that? What about version control and collaboration mechanisms; e.g. how do the mechanisms for merging divergent document versions in Word compare with text files in LaTeX/etc. plus your off-the-shelf VCS of choice? Managing references? (I honestly don't know the answers to most of these questions, but I think they are important for a qualitative comparison.) Fourth, drawing sweeping conclusions about public spending on research from such limited study that doesn't even account for half the stuff that's going on in writing a typical research paper (multi-author collaborations, researching and citing references, generation of tables and figures from data) is kinda ... out there. Fifth, while you generally don't have to worry about researchers being able to afford a nice Windows or Mac system with MS Office and Endnote, the same may not hold for students. Especially when your research needs require decent POSIX-ish capabilities, in practice this means OS X or Linux. Plenty of students in engineering fields do run Linux by preference, and can run Word only via a dual-boot setup or virtual hosting. Forcing them to switch to Word would be counterproductive. [1] See, for example, Kieran Healy's write-up here: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/ http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/