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In computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

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> Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free.

The arXiv (http://arxiv.org) has a good claim on allowing one to extend this "more free"ness to math and many of the physical sciences, too.

how does citeseerx compare to arxiv? Are they just different networks (PSU/Cornell) that function independently or do they index the same content?

They are very different beasts. Arxiv (and most pre-print repos) accept submissions (with filters, like requiring academic affiliation or vouching, and requiring reasonably-formatted metadata), have a moderator do a skim-level review of the work, and then post it. CiteseerX is an automated crawler, like Google Scholar, which finds PDFs on author homepages and extracts metadata from the PDF. There is no human review or cleanup process, and there can be a long delay before content gets discovered.

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