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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#111

Post by PeterisP »

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?

All these employees, including the CEO, are no longer in control anymore; the owner, Elsevier, is in control and is not an impartial 'financial investor' but an 'strategic investor' with a larger stake in the industry than the whole of Mendeley.

It means that a week ago CEO could make the same promises and be heard seriously, but the same CEO promises right now are not worth the paper they're not written on.

Now at any point in the future all the Mendeley 'openness' promises can be easily broken by Elsevier, so they either know that all the promises they're making now are empty (i.e., lying intentionally) or they don't know that (then they're naive and incompetent as general managers).

Promises can be made by those in control. Leaders in public companies can be considered in control. Leaders in privately held companies can be considered in control if their public vision and roadmap is aligned with the owner. But if the owner has a clear interest to change the roadmap - then it would be imprudent to rely on such a roadmap. Elsevier has a reputation of intentionally sabotaging projects (say, gov't initiatives) that should bring openness - if they fool you twice, shame on you.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#112

Post by PeterisP »

rsvidal wrote: post #105
glesica wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally integrated Mendeley into my process as a student, despite the fact that I should have known better. Sometimes everyone gets distracted by shiny things, I guess. Shame on me.

Mendeley is not going to stop working all of a sudden. It's still the same tool, developed by the same people, with the same roadmap and vision ahead.

Their vision right now has a remote control with a "reverse" button, held by well known enemies of that vision.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#113

Post by Altenuvian »

if anything this as just re-injected new life into the elsevier-protests and the sorry state of academic publishing in general.

elsevier's business practices are well documented and the protest is not just manned by some fringe people but has support from prestigious institutions and scholars.

with each new round like this people will educate themselves even more about open access and contemporary free and open source tools for academic work.

zotero probably will win this out and be pushed to mimic mendely features soon enough. zotero already is pretty good but its social features need to developed or integrated with other platforms like arxiv or academia.net.

last not least given googles science-bias and foothold in academia not least with google-scholar and google docs I wonder why they haven't made a move with respect to citation management.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#114

Post by jrochkind1 »

simonster wrote: post #80
tomrod wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access. JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.

In my world, I guess I think of JSTOR as the "good guys." The trustees of its parent organization are real academics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITHAKA ). Its fees are extraordinarily reasonable, at least compared to Elsevier's. (JSTOR fees for large U.S. universities are on the order of $10,000 annually, whereas my university says they pay about $2 million per year to Elsevier.) Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit, I…

> Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit, I don't really see where the money would go besides toward the actual cost of making the research publicly available (which in JSTOR's case is non-trivial, since they are scanning a lot of publications instead of converting InDesign files to PDFs).

I agree with your point. But you are ignoring another major expense that the fees go to:

Paying the actual publishers and rights-holders licensing fees. JSTor is not a publisher. Most of what they distribute, there is a copyright holder, usually the original publisher, that will not let them host and distribute without a fee.

This is obviously not something JStor has a whole lot of control over.

I agree that JStor are the 'good guys'; their fees are more reasonable than most of their for-profit competition, AND their service is _just plain better_ than most of their for-profit competition.

It would be interesting to see how much of JStor's budget goes to paying licensing fees to the rightsholders; I don't know if that information is public.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#115

Post by rplacd »

spindritf wrote: post #47
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.…

> 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 r…

> The government is the entity which created the problem.

And it acts as an extension of "the people" as the entity providing oversight and regulation in this example as well. That it doesn't happen in real life is evidence of subversion of an ideal, rather than some inherent truth.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#116

Post by JulianMorrison »

bmalee wrote: post #7
Pitarou wrote: post #6

Now 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?

Companies are implemented over people. They can be non-evil, it's just that all the incentives are against it.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#117

Post by frabcus »

rsvidal wrote: post #109
jessriedel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why the use of the past tense? Mendeley still has all those features and more. :) Also, the open API we provide allows for building third-party applications like Android apps and such. But I digress. :) (Disclosure: I'm part of the Mendeley team)

The past tense is presumably because the GP doesn't want to use a tool produced by Elsevier, so as far as they are concerned the tool no longer exists.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#118

Post by rsvidal »

PeterisP wrote: post #112
rsvidal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mendeley is not going to stop working all of a sudden. It's still the same tool, developed by the same people, with the same roadmap and vision ahead.

Their vision right now has a remote control with a "reverse" button, held by well known enemies of that vision.

"We are committing to implementing Mendeley’s existing product development roadmap, and giving the company the space to “let Mendeley be Mendeley.”" - http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#120

Post by jessriedel »

kanzure wrote: post #108
jessriedel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 So can Zotero. http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata > automatically fetching the bibliographic info. https://github.com/zotero/translators https://github.com/zotero/translation-server (Those two repositories are the gre…

Thanks for the correction. I never downloaded it because it was described everywhere on the web as a browser extension. The existence of the standalone client is not mentioned on the homepage, where in fact it says "It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself."

Is the standalone client decent? Is the meta-data retrieval as good as Mendeley?

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