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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#41

Post by Evbn »

mjn wrote: post #9
1337biz wrote: post #4

I 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 nonprofi…

Still wondering how academia.edu got approved for an edu domain name. Screams scam to me.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#42

Post by Evbn »

bioinformatics wrote: post #19
mjn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nonprofi…

The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.

PR is irrelevant to "open". Either the product is or isn't. Academics should be smart enough is it isn't.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#43

Post by onemorepassword »

cs702 wrote: post #2

Mendeley'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 so…

an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands

That's why we have governments.

No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.

What has undermined public/private solutions is not public opinion or political ideology, but greed, lobbying and corruption. A foundation is nothing but a workaround, and foundations have a history of getting corrupted by the greed and delusions of grandure of its administrators.

It's time we address the real problem. The legacy of thousands of years of civilization is being stolen from us.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#44

Post by tomrod »

cs702 wrote: post #2

Mendeley'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 so…

Know any donors? I'd love to be involved in a project like this. I wonder if the Wikimedia foundation would be interested--that would do a lot to get over the network effect advantages JSTOR and Elsevier already have.

Additionally, I think that until academic publishing has a standard browser-based solution (MathML, MathJax + Pandoc + LaTeX) outside of PDF that the costs will be prohibitively expensive.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#45

Post by pms »

rrrrtttt wrote: post #37
pms wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.

Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.

Well, the coercive component is the unified reputation that you gain in this site, just like the reputation that you gain in SO. Obviously, the higher reputation you have, the more recognizable you are and more people read about what you do.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#46

Post by yarrel »

res0nat0r wrote: post #27
bioinformatics wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.

All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?

No, they turned into useful idiots.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#47

Post by spindritf »

onemorepassword wrote: post #43
cs702 wrote: post #2

Mendeley'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 so…

an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands That's why we have governments. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.…

> It's time we address the real problem.

The real problem is that some companies manage to exploit a monopoly granted to them by the government in ways that are not pleasing to the public. The government is the entity which created the problem. Granted, while solving another but it will still be the government agents who break down your door and arrest you if you build an unauthorized competitor or even just try to release that "legacy" (vide Aaron Swartz), not Elsevier's.

It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it) who enforce the rules stopping others from competing.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#48

Post by omnisci »

pseut wrote: post #40
hack_edu wrote: post #11

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…

Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I m…

One of the many problems with academic publishing is that it's holding on to an antiquated idea behind publishing and not progressing with the way communications are moving now. In a sense, publications are moving at 1970s speed and this hurts science. Hence the technical need to bring it to current times.

Is it a "technical issue"? No, but neither is booking your flight via phone, that worked just fine. Could it be made much better, more accessible, cheaper, and overall better via technology. Yes.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#49

Post by hemmer »

1337biz wrote: post #4

I 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.

I really like the way Mendeley handles notes, specifically highlighting / annotating PDFs. Do you know of any alternatives that include this? I was planning on writing my own at some point but it might be a bit ambitious.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#50

Post by parennoob »

With Google Reader recently announcing the shutdown, and now this, closed-source cloud-based solutions for organizing and processing my data have started looking increasingly unattractive to me. I guess the only safe way to retain all of your data and prevent commercial interests from affecting its organization is to organize it using (preferably) open-source tools on your own computers, and use the cloud only for backing up the raw data / generated databases so they can be recovered later.
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