It's frustrating to see science emasculating itself and rely on commercial, even monopolistic services when there is no lack of research in document search and

It's frustrating to see science emasculating itself and rely on commercial, even monopolistic services when there is no lack of research in document search and comprehension. Ten or fifteen years ago there was citeseer for tracking citations. It was a messy Perl program/site to scan through mostly TeX files for metadata and references, yet it worked relatively well, and was held reasonably up-to-date. Then they rewrote it into CiteseerX, such that it became useless. It never recovered.