We just came upon a good example of why one should strictly follow the International System of Units (SI), as defined in http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/introduction.html . An author represented a flow rate, cubic meters per second, as “cms” instead of the standard, m³/s. Nobody caught this in review, so the copy editor saw a non-SI unit. Not understanding “cms” was meant to represent a flow, they thought it meant the plural of centimeter and corrected it to the standard “cm”.
Using cms is a throwback to the old cubic feet per second abbreviation, cfs. While not as ambiguous as cms, cfs still requires users to interpret an arcane form. It’s one of the reasons most of the world has left English units behind.
Bottom line: Use SI or risk having to write an erratum.
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The standard symbol for cubic metres per second is m³/s (not m3/s).
Sorry, HTML symbols undid me!
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