Database RSS alerts

A few months ago, a colleague and I discovered a certain database (which I shan't name because I've forgotten which it was) had RSS alerts, but try as we might we couldn't get them to work on Google Reader.

I got curious again recently - and more importantly I got time - so I sat down with a list of engineering databases and started checking them one at a time to see what kinds of search alerts they each had. My results so far:

Compendex

• weekly
  
• search alerts
  
• by email or RSS

ScienceDirect

• daily, weekly, or monthly
  
• search alerts, topic alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  
• by email or RSS - but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you're using the database through a proxy server

Scopus

• daily, weekly, or monthly
  
• search alerts and citation alerts
  
• by email or RSS - but the RSS link has to be edited as above

Web of Science

• weekly or monthly
  
• search alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
  
• by email or RSS - but the RSS link has to be edited

Standards New Zealand

• when a standard is updated
  
• email only

What's this manual editing I'm talking about? Well, the typical rss feed from these databases looks approximately like: http://database.com.proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz/rss/lotsofgobbledygook
The proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz stuff allows me to access a database from anywhere in the world - but it requires me to authenticate when I do. Google Reader, obviously, doesn't know my login details, so when it tries to follow that link it fails. (Sometimes it tells me it's failed - "no feed found" - and sometimes it tells me it's subscribed but there's nothing on the feed itself.)

If I delete the proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz gunk, Google Reader subscribes quite happily and shows me everything on the feed. But I shouldn't have to delete the stuff manually - the database should give me the correct feed url to start with. As Compendex does.