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I think there is a lot to learn from what you said, but I just want to remind everyone else reading your comment that it is anecdotal. I have experience with both research in physics and chemistry in multidisciplinary teams, and my experience is the exact opposite to yours in terms of competition and the willingness to help others. Heck, the last time I released some results on arXiv a group that is notoriously unfriendly suddenly reached out and was all friendly. It turns out that after discussing with us about our results they released a half-finished draft on something similar that they have been working on, and presumably tried to stay ahead/dilute the significance of our results by getting it published in a peer-reviewed journal first. Also, during the time we were doing our work, nobody responded when we were asking if we could access data or algorithms. I don't blame anyone and we're definitely not entitled to anyone's help, but that's just a counter example and obviously depends on how well you know the field, everyone else in the field, reputation, etc. I personally enjoyed using LaTeX for writing manuscripts for physics-oriented topics, but I don't mind Word for chemistry manuscripts. In fact, I would argue that writing chemistry manuscripts in LaTeX sucks for most chemists (maybe except for theoretical and some physical chemists) simply because editing chemical structures, reactions, equipment setup and process diagrams is easy with an embedded chemical editor object in a Word document. I'm not familiar with how they work internally at publishers when getting manuscripts ready for publishing, but most journals require you to use a Word template with ready-to-use style rules and adhere to certain easy-to-follow formatting rules for everything else. Remembering my early days of using LaTeX (when I was already familiar with using Word for manuscripts), I could say the same about how cumbersome it is to do certain things in LaTeX without even talking about chemical structures. Particularly when it comes to journals that charge subscription fees, I'm not sure why you seem to suggest that it's on the authors to get the manuscript "camera ready". If nothing else, I have seen just as many crap-looking papers formatted with LaTeX than those with Word, and the same can be said about good-looking papers. So... I guess it just depends on the authors themselves and/or the editors. For much the same reasons as what I have said about competition, I think your last comment is just as biased against your own experience than everything else in my opinion. |