A little while ago, over at Genomes Unzipped, Joe Pickrell asked, “Why publish science in peer reviewed journals?” He points out the flaws with the current peer review system and suggests how we can do better. What he suggests is missing is the killer app for peer review.
Well, PLoS has now developed an API, where you can easily access tons of data on the papers published in those journals including downloads, citations, number of social bookmarks, and mentions in major science blogs. Along with Mendeley a free reference manager, they have launched an competition to build cool apps with their free data.
Seems like with the right statistical analysis/cool features a recommender system for say, PLoS One could have most of the features suggested by Joe in his article. One idea would be an RSS-feed based on an idea like the Pandora music sharing service. You input a couple of papers you like from the journal, then it creates an RSS feed with papers similar to that paper.