Scientific publication is a complex ecosystem, and there is no shortage of views on how to improve it, support it, burn it down, rebuild it, finance it, etc
But we should be able to agree on one thing: forcing authors to format manuscripts before the manuscript is accepted is an immense waste of time.
@halama_immuno I do think we as a civilisation have the technological capacity to address this challenge.
@cyrilpedia I can see that there are specific requirements, for example LATEX integration with mathematical symbols, but the challenge appears to be moderate...
@cyrilpedia Fully agreed! It is not understandable, why still no standard format for all first submissions exist...a simple json or XML type basic layout would be so easy and each journal could build a simple conversion tool to even produce PDFs automatically...