The problem is that fundamentally, research papers have nothing to do with dissemination of knowledge, they're simply notches in a researcher's belt. There's a long laundry list of how this manifests in terms of readability.

I currently have a solution to try to fix this, it's still in pre-alpha stage:

www.wikipaper.org

If any HN'ers has time to help me I'd be much appreciative. For one thing I need help building a search index of existing wikipages.

There's been many, many attempts to solve this problem in the past but all of them have been fairly limited in featureset & momentum.