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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#91

Post by mcrider »

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.

Try the Public Knowledge Project. You can contribute monetarily, by helping fix bugs in one of their open source software packages, or by finding one of the many open access journals that use their software and contributing articles or editorial support (note: I used to work for them).

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#92

Post by jessriedel »

mjn wrote: post #21
Jun8 wrote: post #12

Hah, this was exactly the reason I was hesitating to use Mendeley, although it's got great tools. Creating your paper database in such a system is a huge investment in time, it's hard and very frustrating to move between such systems. AFAIK, the open source tools cannot much the maturity of Mendeley, am I wrong? In this age and time, how hard can it be to clone a service like that?

It depends on what parts you're using. If you're using Mendeley mainly as a personal reference manager, Zotero is as good as Mendeley or better imo. But it doesn't have a web-based social layer like Mendeley does, for people who like that part.

I think Mendeley had more advantages over Zotero than the social aspect (which I never used). Mendeley could automatically incorporate your folder of orphan PDFs into your library, automatically fetching the bibliographic info. It had a nice dedicated desktop client for searching your library, correctly bib info, and adding notes and whatnot to papers, which just isn't as nice on a browser.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#93

Post by mtraven »

asdf333 wrote: post #8

Well 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.

Mendeley was not a direct threat to Elsevier's business. They aren't a publisher. PLoS (and PLoS's model) is more of a direct threat. Fortunately they are a non-profit which I think makes them immune from takeover.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#95

Post by pyre »

acomar wrote: post #73
scarmig wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You can't fork funding the way you fork source code though. It's not just more expensive, but fundamentally different.

You can't fork funding, but I'm thinking that we're talking about forking content. If the Wikimedia Foundation decided to go in a direction people didn't like, it would be possible to fork all of their content and start your own competing wiki (bring your own funding, of course).

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#96

Post by pseut »

pms wrote: post #87
pseut wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Provide for the papers a system of transparent reviews... [snipped] I don't think this is a technical issue. Journals make mistakes on which papers to publish all the time, even when the referees work hard and take the review seriously, so this is hard for committed people to do well.

Sure, but reviews are not transparent, nor accessible to the public. Why not? Wouldn't it be nice to see what other people think about the article before reading it? Currently there are citations, but that's about it.

My point is only that these are cultural issues, not technological issues; I agree that it might be useful to see referee reports.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#97

Post by [deleted] »

pseut wrote: post #70
omnisci wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An anecdote: I finished a decent draft of a paper two weeks ago and posted it to my website an hour before submitting it to a journal. The code to replicate it is on github available to anyone who wants to look at it, and the statistical methods I use I've put in a GPL R package. I've already discussed aspects of the paper and some implementation issues with other researchers over email, presented the paper at confer…

[deleted]

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#98

Post by acomar »

pyre wrote: post #95
acomar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You can't fork funding the way you fork source code though. It's not just more expensive, but fundamentally different.

You can't fork funding, but I'm thinking that we're talking about forking content. If the Wikimedia Foundation decided to go in a direction people didn't like, it would be possible to fork all of their content and start your own competing wiki (bring your own funding, of course).

Of course, but that does nothing to take power over research away from the likes of Sarah Palin and Todd Akin.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#99

Post by onemorepassword »

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…

Sarah Palin wouldn't stand a chance in hell in mature democracy that hasn't been corrupted by the power of money.

Palin is a sock puppet for those with the money, and the people voting for the likes of her have been deliberately deprived of a decent education. This is a symptom of the same corruption.

The open source movement is a workaround, exploiting a flaw in a corrupted system. It should serve as an example of how much better things can be, not as an excuse to never address the problem, especially not when millions are being criminalized by exactly the same copyright system for the simple act of sharing.

It's not fault tolerant: changes in the copyright law (the laws bought and paid for) can kill copyleft, and whatever license one may prefer, copyleft upholds some of the essential pillars of the open source ecosystem.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of pragmatically using these workarounds.

But I'm also in favor of keeping our eyes on the prize: the knowledge accumulated over millennia should not be allowed to be monopolized and exploited by the few.

Open source is not a "third way". It's a necessary detour.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#100

Post by kriro »

Ideologically I feel like every tax funded researcher (i.e. the vast majority) has an obligation to make all his work publicly accessible.

Change will happen once open access journals get A level status. If there's enough that are sufficiently peer reviewed a simple legislative fix (for state funded/supported education which is the case for most forms of education) would be to treat open access publications preferential when it comes to hireing new academic staff.

As someone with the long term vision of massive changes in education towards e-learning I think the way to attack this is to actually couple OA initiatives with sites like coursera, edx etc.

How deep are the Buffet/Gates pockets, maybe just buying up a bunch of content and freeing it might be the easiest path.

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