Innovations in Scholarly Publishing - One of the biggest bottlenecks in Open Access publishing is typesetting. It shouldn't be.

"I applaud all the scholars out there who have decided to work on and publish in Open Access journals. Over the past few years there has been an ever-rising chorus of people testifying that everything that publishers allegedly do can be done by the scholarly community itself. For example, it’s not controversial to recognize that the entire peer review process can be conducted without publishers being present at all ... On the other hand, there is a place where many academics find that publishers add demonstrable value. That place is typesetting ... Part of the current bottleneck in Open Access scholarly publishing comes down to typesetting – it’s not unheard of for an article to take three months or more before it reaches its final, typeset version. The challenge here is that most scholarship is written in Microsoft Word, which is terribly difficult to translate into the other document formats that scholarship needs. For instance, articles need to be translated into HTML for reading on the web, XML so that they may be included into certain indexes, etc. MSWord is good for none of these.  One way to lessen the need for professional typesetting is to get documents out of Microsoft Word and into a standard markup language. The benefits here are boundless. Once in a standard markup format, having HTML, PDF, XML, and other versions is a breeze! The problem here, though, is that most people consider MSWord as the only way to create a document ... "