This approach has been followed by the American Physical Society.
At the tug '91 meeting at Boston, it was estimated that commercial publishers handle some 5 to 10% of their (scientific) production trough (La)TeX.
And in the CIS - Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Russia--mir has adopted the ams approach as well. Undoubtedly more are to follow.
The American Mathematical Society
The ams do their complete production trough TeX: » 100 000 pages/year, and provide authors with
The American Physical Societyhandle some 20% of their production trough LaTeX. They cooperate with The Optical Society of America and the American Institute of Physics. Their style is called REVTeX.
mir publishers Moscow - the driving force behind CyrTUG, the Cyrillic language-oriented TeX users group - translated among other things Tugboat and Spivak's The Joy of TeX into Russian. I would not be surprised to hear that they do the production of their scientific documents with TeX too, completely. They have the knowledge and TeXnology. The TeX- and Metafont-based technology does not require much hard currency for investment.
And what is going on in Japan? The JTUG has at least 500 members. They have translated among others the TeXbook and the LaTeX manual into Japanese. Some years ago I received a Japanese newspaper set by JTeX!