Sharing documents with bibtex bibliography from org to non-org users

[Martin Leduc <ldcmrtn@gmail.com>]

Hi orgers,

People using org-mode or LaTeX to write scientific papers inevitably 
face problems when time comes to share a manuscript with co-authors for 
reviewing. Unless one decides to restrict the choice of his co-authors 
based exclusively on their knowledge of LaTeX, collaborators generally 
use Microsoft Word to write their documents.

One way to share LaTeX documents with non-LaTeX users is to simply 
copy-paste the LaTeX file into a Word document. You can then share this 
file with other people along with a pdf-compiled version of the 
manuscript allowing them to see all references, bibliography, equations 
and figures. This is the most convenient approach for the first author, 
who can simply copy-paste back the text into a tex file after the rounds 
of review and then compile the LaTeX manuscript again following some 
minor debugging.

However, the latter approach may not be suitable in situations where the 
document is intended to stay into a word format for whatever reason. It 
could be for instance because you want to be kind with some co-authors 
that wouldn't pay much interest into a scary document filled with 
complicated codes.

So I would like to know what are the best known strategies to circumvent 
the latter issue. To simplify, I accept that I will need to rewrite the 
equations (and eq. numbers) in the Word document. What I really want, 
however, is all the citations and the list of references being managed 
automatically at the step of exporting from org to ODT or to Plain Text.

The only solution I see now is to export the org document to a plain pdf 
(e.g. with no page numbers) and then to copy-paste the pdf into a Word 
document. This strategy is cumbersome because a lot of work is generally 
needed to format the word document (page wrapping, no line breaks 
between paragraphs, words hyphenation, etc).

Is there any cleaner solutions to this issue ? Or more general ideas on 
how we could facilitate the sharing of documents containing a bibtex 
bibliography between org and non-org users ?

Thanks

Martin