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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#121

Post by jessriedel »

frabcus wrote: post #117
rsvidal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. I was already very hesitant to invest a bunch of time in a tool that could be pulled out from underneath me by a for-profit company, and in fact I never integrated it into my work. With Elsevier owning it, I wouldn't consider risking it.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#123

Post by kanzure »

jessriedel wrote: post #120
kanzure wrote: post #108

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 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?

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

I think the standalone client is actually based on Gecko SDK and possibly xulrunner, so calling it standalone might be a little unfair of me. However, it certainly doesn't require Firefox itself...

Zotero retrieves metadata directly from a publisher's site with 100s of javascript plugins. Mendeley told me once that they just do OCR with some super-proprietary system they licensed. But I suspect that Mendeley now uses their servers to centralize millions of pdfs and their metadata, and probably uses that to identify and fingerprint the files in your collection... maybe.

Here's to hoping that Elsevier wont revoke your pdfs!

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#124

Post by jessriedel »

bmalee wrote: post #20
Pitarou wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is how capitalism works. Companies (and individuals) try to maximise their own profits; and (ideally) the most profitable course of action is the one which is the most beneficial to the most people. Altruism has no place in it. And yet, people are continually surprised and disappointed when a company takes a profitable course of action, rather than ignoring profits for altruistic reasons.

It's not a matter of altruism, it's a matter of reputation. I reasonably guessed that Mendeley would not try to screw scientists in the short run in order to preserve their reputation in the long run, all to benefit their own profit. However, Elsevier (1) does not have much of a good reputation to risk and (2) can also coordinate with its publishing arm to further multiply the benefit of screwing scientists than Mendeley could alone. It might have been possible for me to predict this business move, but that's a very complicated calculation. I'm not unreasonable for failing to have done so. You can argue that it would have been more prudent to never trust any company that might be sold, but then you'd be criticizing my risk calculation and not my confusion about altruism.

Likewise, I could be surprised that a fancy restaurant replaced all their silverware with disposable plastic. It would maximize their profits that night, but destroy their reputation and hence long-term profits.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#125

Post by PeterisP »

rsvidal wrote: post #118
PeterisP wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I'd be rich if I had a penny for each time such promises were publicly made when acquiring a company and broken within less than 12 months.

Even right here on HN there have been many posts about such situations some time after acquisitions; and Elsvier reasonably does have practical motivation to interfere here and there.

Such arms-length separations are often published in mergers&acquisitions PR and practically never happen in practice, they all get abused - should we really believe that Elsevier is so exceptionally more etchical than most other companies?

They have that "remote" in their hands. They have promised not to use it. Will they?

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#127

Post by glesica »

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.

The keys to the castle have been turned over to the enemy. I'm going to have to migrate eventually, so might as well start sooner rather than later. This is an incredibly sad event for me. But, like I said, I should have known better. Closed-source software can be taken away and turned toward evil purposes and there's nothing the users can do about it.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#128

Post by bjustin »

simonster wrote: post #52
tomrod wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask Google to do it. If they can get books scanned, OCR'ed and available online, they should be able to do journal articles as well.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#130

Post by Thrymr »

PeterisP wrote: post #110
pms wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A public review of article X by reviewer Y would often be quite different than a double-blind review of the same article by the same reviewer. There are some arguments for both approaches, but I believe that the double-blind approach is much better.

I don't think any journal reviews attempt to be double-blind. I could be wrong, but I've never heard of it in my field. In smaller fields, even single-blind (the author not knowing the identity of the reviewer) is difficult, the other way around would be impossible.
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