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 the 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 the pdf-compiled version to allow 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 several situations. 
For instance, it could be because the document is intended to stay into 
a word format for whatever reason, or simply 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 from now is to export the org document to a 
plain pdf (e.g. with no page numbers) and then to copy paste from the 
pdf to a Word documents. This strategy is rather cumbersome as a lot of 
work is needed in terms of formatting 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 documents containing a bibtex 
bibliography between org and non-org users ?

Thanks

Martin