> I can't wait for a day when we get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the papers that ever get published by major research

> I can't wait for a day when we get a centralized, non-profit, publish/subscribe consumer service for all the papers that ever get published by major research universities (with a good search tool) You probably know about this already, but if you're interested in anything biomedical in nature, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed interface to the MEDLINE database (also managed by the NLM) is exactly what you describe: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed MEDLINE is a bibliographic database that indexes all of the abstracts going back to the 1960s from literally every major (and almost all minor) journals that do anything even remotely related to biomedicine, and also include a surprising number of physics and CS journals. It features a robust and easy-to-use API, and has since the 1990s. All MEDLINE entries include obvious bibliographic metadata (titles, authors, abstracts, dates, etc.) but also include human-curated index headings, which makes searching way easier. PubMed's interface makes it easy to construct complicated and accurate queries, and the NLM offers online access to their reference librarians, as well. Furthermore, any published research that is funded by the US National Institutes of Health has to have its full text (including figures, references, etc.) posted to PubMed Central (PMC), which is another online database that the NLM maintains. This is an actual law- if you get money from the NIH, your publications have to end up in PMC following a short embargo period- I think it's about six months post-publication? All of the PMC content is available free of charge, and it also has an API. It is not a complete full-text mirror of MEDLINE, because not everything in MEDLINE was NIH-funded, but for research going back over the last 7-10 years or so it is often surprisingly complete. This is one area where biomedicine is way ahead of computer science. As somebody who's worked a lot in both fields, I definitely find myself missing PubMed whenever I need to look for CS literature... As an aside, the National Library of Medicine is truly one of the hidden jewels of the US government. Its budget is tiny, but it somehow manages to produce fabulous work and performs a vital service for the research community. And almost nobody has heard of it!