I was never a user, but it sounds like a great service. A real shame it's shutting down.

I'm wondering why they aren't open-sourcing it, that at least would remove the time constraint. If it's a really useful scholarly tool, then possibly some universities would like to use it/invest some resource in it? For the discovery aspect, federating it sounds like the best option. Each university could offer their instance to their users, and federate it with other universities/educational institutions.