Many of biologists stick to word file, especially the review/communet function. It is often because the collaborators stick to word and you have to follow up with it.
back in the day when I did this, I ended up writing papers with biologists. All the biologists would be cc'd on an email with the doc as an attachment and a "token" was passed between people to determine doc ownership. The person would make their changes and reattach the new doc to the email and pass the token to the next person.
Ultimately, this would fall over as people accidentally made concurrent changes and it would be hard if not impossible to merge between two documents. Doc files were never designed to be put into a version control system with merge semantics. Some people use shared folders with locking but locking doesn't work well over file shares.
I'm not sure but I suspect now people use dropbox instead of email; it's not clear to me how they manage conflicts and merges.
I rather my format be a text-line-based non-rendered format that I can render down if need be, but use the full power of patch and diff to manage conflicts.
