A colleague of mine (I'm in mathematics) has shown me a splendid note. He took some of the results from a confusing, hard to read, and important paper from the 1970's, which have not yet appeared in book form, and gave them much cleaner and simpler proofs, and explained them in a very clear way.
I urged him to publish his writeup, and to submit it to a very good journal. But he feels that, because the results are not (strictly speaking) new, the paper would be unlikely to be accepted.
Certainly I feel that work such as his is extremely valuable, and I think the mathematical community ought to encourage more of it. Was I right to encourage him to publish? Or was his pessimism more on target?