That sounds a lot like Mendeley’ s initiative. From their press release:

Elsevier is challenging developers in Australia, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States to create fully operational applications for the SciVerse platform. In combination with third party APIs and open data, applications can be created utilizing content APIs which enable integration with Elsevier’s full text article database SciVerse ScienceDirect and abstract and citation database SciVerse Scopus.

Always good to see publishers and alike fighting to improve their products. Looks like the opening of API to the public is all over internet, these days. Whether they will truly open their database remains to be seen. I’m curious to see what they will come up with.