Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
paidcontent.org
Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
1–10 of 152 posts
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#2Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-y... -- one slide shown in the background, in particular, makes me cringe and laugh at the same time: "Only sell your users to whoever has the deepest pockets."
PS. More seriously, I've come to feel that only a non-profit organization can solve the "walled garden" problem in academic publishing. We need something like a "Mozilla Foundation for Science" -- an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#3There's a slight irony that this news story is being posted on a site which is partially owned by Elsevier.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#4I don't get it. It was absolutely clear that they were using a propiretory software owned by a for-profit company.
There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero et al.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#5My own personal favourite, Papers (papersapp.com), was recently taken over by Springer too. So far, so good--the original team is still running it and there's no sign anything bad will come of it, but I'm still wary of the future.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#6Now I'm going to have to e-mail all the friends I advocated Mendeley to, and tell them to consider switching. Serves me right for not looking more carefully at whose interests Mendeley was serving.
:-(
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#7Now I'm going to have to e-mail all the friends I advocated Mendeley to, and tell them to consider switching. Serves me right for not looking more carefully at whose interests Mendeley was serving. :-(
Honestly? It's a for-profit company, whose interests did you think was serving?
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#8Well then, Elsevier may have won. 70 mil to destroy a viable threat to its monopoly may be a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#9I don't get it. It was absolutely clear that they were using a propiretory software owned by a for-profit company. There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero et al.
While true, it seemed like a fairly pro-openness company, which not only said the right things but seemed to have a lot of employees genuinely committed to improving the state of academic literature.
But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofit foundation, or at least a forkable open-source version of the platform, seem like necessary prerequisites if you want to ensure that Elsevier-and-co can't buy it out. I guess a company 100%-owned by a strong open-culture advocate could be reliable also, but it gets more complex when investors are in the mix.
Also a reason I don't trust academia.edu compared to, say, the arXiv.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#10Now I'm going to have to e-mail all the friends I advocated Mendeley to, and tell them to consider switching. Serves me right for not looking more carefully at whose interests Mendeley was serving. :-(
Honestly? It's a for-profit company, whose interests did you think was serving?
Yeah. My bad. I had a real need and Mendeley's software (which is awesome, by the way) came to my rescue; issues of who controls it and what they might want from me someday seemed very far away at the time.