People might like to look at the revtex4 beta release (for which I was
somewhat to blame). This has rather extensive support for frontmatter and
bibliography handling, trying to provide consistent markup for the
author, but radically different presentation styles for various
journals.

It would be simpler to implement such a scheme using the proposed
interface for latex classes described in the carlisle/mittelbach/rowley
talk at tug99, the slides for which (pdf) were handed in to the
conference organisers and so should be appearing on the
www.tug.org/tug99 site sometime soon (I hope)

David