There’s a problem with academic publishing. This could be (but isn’t) a post about the lottery of peer review, the scandalous mountain of largely unpaid reviewing and editorial work that journals benefit from, the urgent need to adopt open access, or the interesting dynamics introduced by pre-print servers. Instead, this post is about a big problem with an easy solution: hours and hours of expert scientific time (and with that, grant money) currently being wasted reformatting manuscript for the initial submission to various journals. The solution: create and implement a truly universal manuscript format for the initial submission.