[timtylin]

The goal is eventually to be able to, like what Authorea is trying to do now, just "slap on" various LaTeX style templates during final rendering (similar to how static blog engines format plain md posts using templates). It's going to be PAINFUL but I think it is eventually doable with enough elbow grease. Markdown is a nice starting point because the features are so spartan that you actually have some hope of finding the "greatest common denominator" document model that can pretty much map injectively to all the major journal-specific LaTeX document-classes.

I'm imagining some kind of online component like ShareLaTeX that will become a clearinghouse for a number of tested and proven conversion paths, and can handle compiling a ScholarlyMarkdown document to different formats. This project won't go anywhere if this can't at least be done for major houses like Elsevier, PNAS, Phys Rev, etc.