Steering committee First Meeting

Except, that almost no Journal have made this choice !

Dear Jeff, thank you for your comment. Probably those well established journals have a structure/staff that surveils drifts from the official style and have the means to correct them, which is not the case of this new journal. I think we should keep things as simple as possible. I am a former user of Word. Now I am a fan of LaTeX. It is easy to install and to get acquainted with LaTeX, especially when one has a template.

I can manage to make the libroffice template without any issue. So I don't think there is a real issue. This is a major decision, most of people here come from numerical mechanics, if you reallt want to be a broad journal in the field of mechanics it is necessary to take into account the habits of authors.

@jeffwitz you are mistaken, most credible journals have a unified way to typeset their papers. When you submit an article, even in LaTeX, publishing companies nowadays use XML to translate the input to multiple output formats (html, epub, pdf, etc.). I actually fight sometimes because they mess up my nicely looking LaTeX document and disregard completely my layout, font type/size in figures (which I match with the rest of the document), to name a couple of issues. They can do this because they have a team behind that can take this workload. So claiming that Science is credible because it has a Word template is nonsense: None of the articles published in Science come untouched from a Word document but it's typeset properly by a team that "translates" that Word document.

I'm with you about giving the possibility to everyone to submit papers to the journal. What I'm saying is that the quality of the final document should be high, and that will never be achieved by using Word or libroffice (everyone who has been exposed to LaTeX long enough can detect the difference between a document typeset in Word and LaTeX). You can choose to publish work coming from a Word template, but in my personal opinion this would be a deterrent already.

What you would really want is to keep things simple so that the minimum amount of effort is put into producing a "professionally looking" document, and LaTeX gives you that option. In fact, if you have a nice template with all the material you could possibly need, all you need to do is to add the text and figures and compile! Typesetting LaTeX is not that hard, and getting to learn it has personally been a very rewarding experience. Perhaps these people who're used to write articles in Word should be pushed out of their comfort zone and maybe they can experience a similar regarding experience... ;)

All that being said, you've shown you are very opinionated, so I'll let you have the last word... :P

"What I'm saying is that the quality of the final document should be high, and that will never be achieved by using Word or libroffice (everyone who has been exposed to LaTeX long enough can detect the difference between a document typeset in Word and LaTeX)."

You will have mailny theoretical and numerical mechanics and experimental people, including myself will make or use other journals that fits this requirement. I find very strange to place the form of the science above the science itself.

Even If I always try to make people use LaTeX a good article is better than a bad, but nice looking one.
This kind of decision should be made by votation.

It is not complex for editors, to refuse an article until it respects the authors guideline. It would be the same for LaTeX, if someone use Macros that change the form, you will refuse it. It is the same with LibreOffice/MSWord.
Providing a template and forbid direct formatting editing is easy to check. In fact there is no difference between LaTeX and LibreOffice/MSWord in this aspect. If you simply respect the template for figures, equation, citations, tables, it would be easy.
If you want to include online graphical enhancement, and other format such as epub, it is different, but if you only want to provide a pdf there is no diffrence.

This is not the right thread to comment on Latex templates but I guess there is no easy way to fix this within the Loomio interface.

Personal opinion. With this overlay journal in Mechanics, which, as a reminder, belongs to the category of Diamond Open Access journals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Diamond/platinum_OA], we are trying to show high quality and that true Open Access can be achieved at a very minimal cost to society. As a reminder, most academic research is financially supported by tax payers and since nothing is free, running the overlay journal will cost money, mainly because it will use Archives (HAL, arxiv,...) which require a budget, hence the Diamond Access category. However, among all possible existing schemes, Gold Open Access with APC, Green Open Access and Diamond Open Access (...), the latter is the least expensive by far. It is still desirable to combine high scientific quality to typographical perfection, at a minimal cost, and Latex is the solution (microtypography, word hyphenation, unified math and text fonts, inclusion of vector graphics, automatic numbering of sections, equations, easy labelling, automatic generation of tables of contents, bibliographies, indexes, lists of acronyms, and glossaries, and much more, all this, for free!). For non-Latex users, several avenues exist: (1) Ask the authors to pay a small fee for translating their document in the latex format, (2) secure a budget from libraries (or even countries) cutting their subscriptions to Green Access journals, again for the same job or (3) ask authors to migrate from non-Latex solutions to Latex solutions. Failing on this high typographical quality will not attract authors to submit their works to the overlay journal, I believe (many non-Latex authors refrain from sharing their preprints on HAL because of their "bad look").

Mathias:

One thing the journal (our journal) cannot afford is committing
ourselves to finding a means to convert non-Latex to Latex files.
What I strongly recommend is to adopt clearly, unambiguously, the
policy that only Latex-produced papers will be accepted as
submissions for reviewing. In the journal webpage we must include
a section for non-Latex users: find a means to convert their files
into Latex. We can give them info on several options, but,
whatever costs are involved in the process, is not our business.
We'll be damn busy looking at the technical contribution to worry
about formatting issues.

Jorge

"we'll busy looking at technical contributions...": unless there are no submissions! 🙂

"microtypography, word hyphenation, unified math and text fonts, inclusion of vector graphics, automatic numbering of sections, equations, easy labelling, automatic generation of tables of contents, bibliographies, indexes, lists of acronyms, and glossaries, and much more, all this, for free!"

All of that requirement are satisfied by LibreOffice, the only thing needed is a template. It is true that there can be differences with a LaTeX article, but on a final pdf, if you respect a template, you will achieve a good result. Once again, I will use LaTeX, but I know a lot of first class researcher who won't. If an article does not satisfy the rules of editing, you just have to reject it.

If you send me your LaTeX template, I can easily make a LibreOffice writer template. If it seems to you not good enough, then you can refuse. I find very strange to refuse a solution because you don't use it. It s not your personal choices which are at stake here. Even if my choice is LaTeX, I don't see any effective reason to refuse to find a solution to be inclusive.

@Jeff Witz as you said earlier... let's vote 😉