Courtesy of the SLA’s (Special Libraries Association) social sciences group, here is a useful round-up of open access science resources.
The list includes all my favourites, I’d perhaps only add that Google Scholar shouldn’t be ignored and I also enjoy the science news site E! Science News.
None of this may seem very disruptive, but that depends where you focus your attention. I get a feeling that the growth in free science resources has probably been quite disruptive to the traditional priced database aggregators such as Proquest Dialog and STN, whittling away at their customer base.
These premium services are really not at risk of dying out as, for many researchers, it is still valuable to have multiple databases under one platform and with one strong search interface, but they’ve had to think carefully about their pricing models and these providers are surely feeling the pressure, both from free sources and the direct offerings from specialist database providers such as competing specialist patent research services.
The Disruptive Searcher 