It sounds to me like maybe you should go one further than just creating a superb academic RSS reader, and instead try to create an online community for academics -- a la reddit for PhDs.

Instead of simply indexing links to other sites, I think it would make sense to provide the necessary tools for academics to _easily_ host papers via this service. This way you wouldn't need to rely on typically paywalled online academic journals, and you wouldn't have to wait for papers to trickle down from Nature, etc.