
Self-host a scientific journal with eLife Lens - anu_gupta
https://medium.com/@_mql/self-host-a-scientific-journal-with-elife-lens-f420afb678aa
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phireal
Is there a tool which will convert a LaTeX source file or Word document into
the necessary format for eLife Lens? If I can avoid it, I'd rather not have to
manually reformat my file into the eLife format.

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phireal
OK, I had a quick search and apparently going from LaTeX to markdown to JATS
XML (with pandoc) [1] [2] is the least horrible way.

[1] [https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-jat](https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-
jat)

[2] [http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/12/12/from-markdown-to-
jat...](http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/12/12/from-markdown-to-jats-xml-in-
one-step)

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arcanus
I'm curious if anyone has seen how equations come out looking with this? I
always cringe when I see non-TeX equations in presentations, at this point.

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imulvany
Lens has support for MathJaX, so math comes out looking pretty well. The AMS
have been helping with the development. See this for an example
[http://lens.elifesciences.org/03568/index.html?_ga=1.1181186...](http://lens.elifesciences.org/03568/index.html?_ga=1.118118656.885554652.1423743368)

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p4bl0
I'm quite active in the open access movement in France. And most of the people
I meet agree that SJS is a dead-end because its creator categorically decline
to open source the software (he wants to be able to sell it).

Apart from that, but it has already been pointed out here, I don't believe
that something not able to at least read TeX sources can easily be
transitioned to.

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p4bl0
Mh, well, I'm just seeing now that I started writing about SJS [1] and didn't
finish my point about Lens… And nobody pointed out that I was off-topic?

So what I was going to append to my first paragraph is this:

In that respect, it's nice to see that Lens is open source, but the title is
still a bit misleading: from what I understand Lens is "only" a novel way of
presenting/reading papers, not a journal management system (which requires
many features such as managing the peer-reviewing process).

[1] Yes I forgot the link too:
[http://www.sjscience.org/](http://www.sjscience.org/)

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imulvany
That's true. Most publishers systems for submission, review and journal
hosting are totally different systems. Lens fits in on the hosting side, not
the submissions or review side, but we are interested in looking at how it
could contribute in the review stage too.

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thanatosmin
Very nice. eLife has always been a joy to read, and has some high quality
articles in my field. Aside from the difficulties of learning JATS XML, this
could be a very nice way to edit articles before submission as an alternative
to Latex/Word.

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arcanus
LaTeX is ubiquitous in my research field. I'm skeptical anything that cannot
parsed .tex will have a chance of competing, at least in the short term.

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98Windows
Would the arvix ever use this?

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blueblob
Short term, doubtful since the majority of ArXiv papers are math/physics
papers and latex is popular in both of those fields.

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tomkinstinch
As an aside, for the biological sciences, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
operates the biorxiv: [http://biorxiv.org/](http://biorxiv.org/)

