Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?

This is a very insightful entry by Michael Nielsen.  Due to my bias, I had to immediately skip to Part II before i came back and read Part I. Some of the things i might question – Automatic spelling correct/relevancy ranking/alerting service, etc are indeed offered on Scopus. But whether they are good (I believe they are competitive) is certainly something the users will judge and Michael would qualify as one. I haven’t heard from any of the users i talked to that any of these feature are poor but again it could be my bias.

A great search engine for science: ISI’s Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s Scopus and Google Scholar are remarkable tools, but there’s still huge scope to extend and improve scientific search engines [6]. With a few exceptions, they don’t do even basic things like automatic spelling correction, good relevancy ranking of papers (preferably personalized), automated translation, or decent alerting services. They certainly don’t do more advanced things, like providing social features, or strong automated tools for data mining. Why not have a public API [7] so people can build their own applications to extract value out of the scientific literature? Imagine using techniques from machine learning to automatically identify underappreciated papers, or to identify emerging areas of study.

via Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?.

Read the article in its entirety. It  is very insightful and several pointers can be taken away as always.