[elcritch]

That doesn't seem too impressive. It's essentially a workflow that a few universities could band together and replicate via an open source project relatively easily IMHO.

As an example, Pandoc can already handle 90% of this type of workflow by itself (converting Latex to various XML formats). An open source project shared among a few universities or developed by single body like the ACM and used among dozen's of publications and fields. Even two or three full time people working on this would cost much less than $1M per year.