is an open source project I am developing that seeks to answer this question.
SciGregator will be an open source project that will work as a news aggregator site might. I will base this off of the rules that Hacker News follows and will seek to create an open platform where scientists can submit academic papers (that have not been published) that the community finds interesting. I think my initial market will be college kids (friends that I know) writing papers on stuff the community finds relevant and interesting and could be a source for furthering research.
My stack will most likely be the web.py framework on google app engine (since the two play nicely together from what I've seen) and html and css thrown on top Not entirely sure what to do about building a database for comments for articles but that's what side projects are for!