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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#51

Post by scarmig »

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.…

I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology?

The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is.

Science is more expensive than software, though, and therein lies the rub.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#52

Post by simonster »

tomrod wrote: post #44
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.

JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#53

Post by treerex »

parennoob wrote: post #50

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 ba…

Zotero is unlikely to go the way of Mendeley: may be worth checking out.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#54

Post by tomrod »

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…

I know a guy. Shoot me an email, let me know what tech you know, and I'll chat with him to see if he's interested.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#55

Post by treerex »

Osmium wrote: post #5

My 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.

Of course Springer has one of the most onerous paywalls I've come across. I hadn't heard of the Papers acquisition: I use it on my iPad but only because it sucks less than every other solution I've looked at.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#56

Post by Thrymr »

scarmig wrote: post #51
onemorepassword wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology? The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others…

Science is already funded, in very large part, by the federal government (in the US). The research is already subject to political pressures, here we're just talking about the (much smaller) amount that goes towards publications. Federal grants are going to fund research, the results of which are locked up behind the paywalls of proprietary journals (grant dollars even pay for the privilege of publishing in some journals). Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#57

Post by hack_edu »

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…

A good start would be increased quality of interfaces and abilities to find and connect similar sources; that's all I'm really asking for. There is a huge amount of research published within the Gale-Wilson-ElSevier-JSTOR-Ebsco-Taylor&Francis vaults, properties of immense academic and economic value, yet the tools they charge to access them aren't much more advanced than Yahoo circa '99. Don't even get me started on the transition from physical-copy journal publishing where you always 'own' the copy to a model of journals-as-a-service (the ultimate DRM; they host it) that cost well into the five figure range per year where you lose all access once you let the subscriptions expire.

Meanwhile, 'search' as we know it rules the world and is the driving force enabling the entire tech industry. It wouldn't be hard to throw a little effort in building out their platforms, but there's no competition to force further development in their products.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#58

Post by [deleted] »

rrrrtttt wrote: post #28
pms wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad review…

Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.

[deleted]

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#59

Post by slightperturb »

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, but with gradual attrition due to fundamental disagreements with the new management, I imagine the character of the company will change significantly within the year, if not sooner.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#60

Post by Thrymr »

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're leaving: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o...

Choice quote: "For that reason then I co-founded PeerJ, an Open Access journal, with one aim of never being in the position to take shit ever again from a closed publisher."

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