I'm interested on following the formal research on universities and academia, related to software development, and I wonder if anyone knows some centralized rss feed (blogs maybe) , mailing list, newsgroup or anything that keeps updating on the subject.
I want to keep up to date on the field and discover sources, so if you have only one source or knows a couple of diferent sites with public access on the subject, please share. =)
Have you tried Google Scholar? A good chunk of the stuff is available for free from mirrors, which Google highlights. You might be able to get an alert on Scholar searches, but I'm not sure about that, to get notified when your search changes.
It's more about web development/design, and you can't call it formal research, but this newsletter from the University of Minnesota is quite complete and always offers some interesting news.
It's certainly worth your time.
Some of following should have articles/papers related to S/w Development:
Communications of ACM : http://www.acm.org/publications/cacm/
ACM Journal : http://toplas.acm.org/ http://tosem.acm.org/
-AD
As of now, I can only think of ACM's Crossroads mag and LtU.
I'd also look under DZone under Google Reader and try to find more news fields on the area you're interested. Over time, it tries to suggest you related content as well.
I think The Register has tech white papers over at http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/ . They're not just software dev papers, but you may find something of interest there!