lens

One of my favorite journals. Perhaps of interest to HNers is their fairly active GitHub: https://github.com/elifesciences, and my favorite project of theirs, Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens, it's a paper viewer that actually makes reading papers easier (there's loads of these out there but most are crap and inferior to a PDF).

This is a very half-baked idea, but perhaps a compromise would be to make the text content free to access and reserve PDF downloads for subscribers or paying customers. Ideally the content would be presented through something like eLife's Lens project. [1] [1]: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens

Typically there is a "script", not the code kind, that is followed for every dodgy Word document received, and following the script is outsourced. The production team is in charge of coordination with the outsourced team and final proofing of the XML and all the vagaries of pre publication that comes from 90s era processes and software and interactions with other ancient systems. However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml An excellent bit of software that takes advantage of it is Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens