Yep, if you're still using Mendeley, you should move to Zotero immediately. I have used Papers app for some time, but they've worked on the desktop app way too long after their merge with ReadCube and now I'm happy with my free Zotero. I've just tested ReadCube Papers with a simple pdf and it's nice and fast, but cannot resolve the metadata (even the suggestions are wrong) while Zotero can do it unambiguously on the first try.
Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#32If I'm understanding things correctly from the reading (which, let's be honest, that's an assumption on its own), the tl;dr seems to be that Mendeley heard about an open source product working on a set of importers that would, potentially, result in Mendeley customers migrating to this free alternative[0]. To provide cover for this change, they invoked user security. And hey, user security is a pretty good reason to…
...I was going to edit my original comment, but it seemed more appropriate to just follow up with a reply... I was unaware that this was an Elsevier product (another comment pointed that out). I do not use Elsevier products (directly, anyway, maybe I do indirectly but I doubt it). I have, however, followed the various controversies surrounding the company for the past several years. Those who are with me will not be…
So it was not developed originally as an Elsevier product, they bought it around 2013 I believe. By all accounts until this, they've also been fairly faithful with the way it's been managed and updated. It is certainly more shiny than Zotero, but I was too nervous about the potential for them doing something like this that I chose zotero (I was moving away from EndNote at the time, which is just too quirky).
I hate being right about such things. This is exactly what the fear was when they bought what was a fantastic piece of software, and doing really interesting things for researchers.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#33Mendeley also snitches evidence of your SciHub habit to Elsevier. It probably won't amount to anything, but do you really want to bet against Elsevier becoming exceptionally greedy, desperate, or both?
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#34To anyone looking for an alternative, I'd just throw out there that I've been very happy with ReadCube. It's proprietary subscription software, but that's a trade-off I can live with for a great browser plugin, mobile apps with good annotation, cloud storage of annotated articles, seamless syncing across devices, and a high-quality Word citation plugin that works on the Mac.
This company bought Papers, the Mac app, and it looks like they are finally getting ready to release the desktop client based on that acquisition.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#35Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…
Personal experience: I made the switch soon after starting my PhD and never looked back. Also, their Connector plugin for Firefox is a life saver. 90% of the time I only have to lookup the title of a paper on DBLP, then export it as BibTeX and pronto, the reference is now in my library with most of the relevant metadata. Much better than Mendeley's quite opinionated plugin (which also won't work unless you log into E…
I never used the Mendeley plugin, but I imagine it must be pretty horrible to store PDFs from all the convoluted sources and proxy setups or library file-servers that universities use.
It probably only works well if you logged into your Elsevier(tm) account.
In any case, the Zotero plugin works great and just saves Metadata and PDFs, as it should. For the usual preprint or paper providers, it works perfectly.
So even here, using Mendeley is just bad.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#36Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…
Also, you may remember me being hesitant to switch to Zotero because in the past it lacked the ability to meaningfully edit saved citations and files, in particular, it would not detect from PDFs for files that you had already downloaded. It worked only well with the plugin, getting the file "fresh" from the publisher.
Mendeley's advantage was that you could just drag and drop a pdf in and it would add meta-data.
I am happy to report that Zotero does this as well now. And it works quite well, sometimes better then Mendeley.
So if that was your reason, like it was for me before I was hit with the "no export disaster", go ahead and switch.
Let Mendeley die the lonely death it deserves.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#37Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…
Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are
- The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case
- The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvement. I'm a researcher not a programmer - which I think describes most people using it. That means unfortunately we are reliant on one or two volunteers to improve the product. The pace of improvement is slow, and theres also no way to meaningfully advance it - be that through offering bounties for someone to implement certain features, just inputing lists of bugs/feature requests (the list is already v long, and doesn't move much), or anything else.
It's a really good bit of software (and I don't want to sound ungrateful), I just know it still has a lot of quirks. This means it can't always do what you want, and it isn't an easy obvious choice for new researchers - Mendeley is certainly more familiar and easier to use.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#38For those wondering, here's what I gathered as some context. Zotero = Your personal research assistant. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. https://www.zotero.org/ Mendeley = Reference Management Software, produced by Elsevier who also happens to be the publisher of many peer-reviewed journals. Elsevier come under fire for it's high costs and gateway actions to…
Good idea re: giving context as to what these programs are. For most of us who do research, these programs are essentially interchangeable "reference managers." Here's what I mean: I read a scientific paper or look up a citation. I add that with a click or two to my reference manager. It also stores the PDF for me. In the future, I can easily re-read the PDF. I can annotate it and the annotations will be stored. Crit…
The only difference is that Mendeley has a built-in PDF viewer with annotation. Of course since you can no longer share these annotations, nor export the pdf, that's all pointless.
Mendeley opens PDFs externally, but many PDF readers can create and save annotations.
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#39For anyone who is interested in the different options for reference management, I've been sporadically maintaining a webpage about the various options since 2015: https://maxmasnick.com/projects/reference-managers/ I re-un-recommended Mendeley back in June 2018 when this news first broke. (I was initially too sketched out by Elsevier to recommend Mendeley, and this just confirms these suspicions.) tl;dr Zotero is a p…
Very informative post, thanks. I’d love to hear your impression of Citationsy (closer to CiteThisForMe or RefMe in functionality than Zotero it EndNote).
Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer
#40For those wondering, here's what I gathered as some context. Zotero = Your personal research assistant. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research. https://www.zotero.org/ Mendeley = Reference Management Software, produced by Elsevier who also happens to be the publisher of many peer-reviewed journals. Elsevier come under fire for it's high costs and gateway actions to…
Let me try to explain.
Mendeley and Zotero basically do the same thing, which is categorizing literature - specifically research papers. Mendeley offers a built-in PDF viewer with annotations tools, Zotero relies on external viewers for that. Both offer cloud storage.
Researchers usually have to categorize and scan over huge amount of prior literature. If you are working on a project, you usually want to have a good library or folder structure detailing relevant literature. When writing your paper, you also want to be able to cite from this library quickly, via BibTex for example.
Researchers maintain a personal library with literature they read, plan to read or have cited. When researchers collaborate, they need to merge these libraries. Since tools differ, the lowest common demoninator is often a dropbox somewhere. Sometimes everyone works on Zotero or Mendeley, such that files can be shared within the system. Usually not.
Mendeley and Zotero used to be equally open to sharing and collaborating. Mendeley was in a sense superior as it was polished, had great tools to annotate and great tools to work with Meta-data. Zotero, while FOSS, was always behind.
Then, Mendeley was bought by Elsevier, the largest publisher. Elsevier does not want people to share PDFs, because Elsevier wants everyone to pay for the priviledge to download those pdfs. Thus, Mendeley started to make it more and more difficult to collaborate. Now it is even difficult to share files within the Mendeley eco-system!
Perhaps you are using Calibre for you Ebooks. Now imagine Calibre would deactivate any way for you to view, send, export or use your files (the files that YOU put into it) outside of the Calibre Ebook viewer, and it would encrypt its database so that you would not even try. That's what happened.
Sharing research is the lifeblood of science, and Elsevier wants to destroy it.
Elsevier has done many other things that has harmed scientific progress - the majority of this undertaking you fund with you tax dollars! The way this is done is almost comically blatant. Elsevier acts like a comicbook villain. They are literally evil.