Steering committee First Meeting

Dear Mathias,
From the two alternative forms of meeting, physically or by videoconference, it is my conviction that the direct contact between the participants during one or two days has much more advantages than disadvantages. A meeting by videoconference rigidifies too much the communication and the decision making processes. Having said this I gladly accept the decision of the majority on the meeting format. Best regards from António.

Hi Mathias, nice work, good news! happy to see that this project is still active :-)

Although I do not have any particular difficulties with LaTeX, it seems to me to be discriminatory to limit it to LaTeX. Many more material-oriented mechanics scientists do not master this tool, so it would prevent some from participating. It is very easy to make a very clean master document with LibreOffice, adding recommendations with some extensions such as TexMath that allow to include LaTeX equations.

@jeffwitz articles not typeset in LaTeX will not look professional no matter how much energy people are willing to put into it.

There is no clear final answer on this. However, a possibility would be to use the Centre Mersenne (https://www.centre-mersenne.org/) Latex expertise for non-Latex authors submitting to our journal. This would involve low fees for the authors... I think it is important to keep high typographical standards for the journal, as made possible with Latex templates.

Even if I understand your point of view regarding High typographical standards, I think that this kind of elitism is not the good way to proceed. The Open Document Format are standards that are acknowledge at least by France (RGI) ans England for official communication. I think that is better to let people use standard format and using different approach than LaTeX.
I think that ooxml should be forbiden as there are binary non-documented blobs. May be put this question to votation when there will a sufficiant audience could be a good idea.

I agree that there're many people in Mech. of Materials and Experimental Mech. community who use MS Word (or may be also OpenOffice) to type their papers. I hope we will be able to find a solution to make possible publication of such papers too.

For decades publishing companies have provided researchers with services. Back in the day it wasn't only typesetting but also printing and distribution. With the advent of the internet these services lost some value, and I wonder how many researchers today really read the printed version of a journal. With the advent of LaTeX, professional typesetting became available to everyone, giving even less power to publishing companies. I would argue that this entire endeavor for a journal in mechanics is partly the result of all that. All of this to say that this endeavor should embrace the future, and not the past. Publishing articles typeset in MS Word would only undermine the journal's credibility. LaTeX tools are open source and are available to everyone. We only require a nice LaTeX template so that people can typeset their articles from the start. We could also partner with online LaTeX companies like Overleaf. At worse, and as suggested by @mathiaslegrand , we could facilitate the LaTeX typesetting for a small fee. All typesetting in publishing companies today is done in countries where labor is cheap.

Dear Alejandro Aragón,

I think it is important to understand that this journal is not only aimed at the community of computational mechanics who are very familiar with the use of LaTeX. Even if I fully share your analysis on the final quality of a document produced with LaTeX, I do not share at all the idea that allowing people to use LibreOffice would harm the journal's reputation, for example. There are big newspapers such as Science, with an IF>40 that have their MSWord template, I don't think any of us think this journal is not credible, do we?
A large majority of mechanics close to the materials I have worked with do not like LaTeX and prefer Word. I think that to already switch from MSWord to LibreOffice would be a very great added value, and to deprive oneself of a whole part of the mechanics is not in my opinion the right way to proceed. I say this by having the majority of articles published with my name on them, written in LaTeX.
Proofreading (or translating) articles written with LaTeX is also more expensive, and takes more time because the pdfs are annotated and you have to reintegrate everything. Similarly, very good scientists are not "native speakers" and also deserve to be able to publish without their lives being a living hell.

In my opinion, if one wishes a uniform visual aspect for all the papers in the journal one has to bound the edition of all papers, with no exceptions, to a single typesetting system with a single template with clear rules.