Citeseer is less useful today than how it was 2 years ago. It seems they stop the crawling looking for papers. [I have a project about adding “web of trust” to citeseer so that every user can express a degree of interest in another users’ kept bibliography) but it seems I never have the time to seriously start it.] Anyway this post is to cite 2 interesting related projects: LionShare and Eprints … (read below for links and details)

LionShare P2P project (see the search screenshot on the wiki) allows people to stop thinking P2P is illegal by default. It is Java Open Source code.
“LionShare P2P project is an innovative effort to facilitate legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions around the world. By using Peer to Peer (P2P) technology and incorporating features such as authentication, directory servers, and owner controlled sharing of files, LionShare promises secure file-sharing capabilities for the easy exchange of image collections, video archives, large data collections, and other types of academic information. In addition to authenticated file-sharing capabilities, the developing LionShare technology will also provide users with resources for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital files.”
(found via the iper-interesting Italian WikiLab).

The other interesting project is more mature and is called Eprints.org – Self-Archiving and Open Access (OA) Eprint Archives. The software is called GNU eprints and it is of course free software. At present, there are 141 known archives running EPrints software worldwide. It is a sort of p2p network where peers are libraries (also University libraries) that certificates that the papers they host are real papers from their scholars. I think that every single researcher can have her own instance of the peer but I think noone is doing it. [Anyway I didn’t investigate too much the project and I could be wrong]. My University Library is one of the 141, good! Among the softwares, there is CiteBase whose goal is, I guess, very similar to citeseer.
You can also admire some powerlaws (are they ubiquitous?) in these graphs (Java applets).
The different eprints peers keep them up to date using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Ok, I must admit I didn’t check the projects in great details so if you do it (or even install them!), leave some comments (if you feel like). Thanks!