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Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

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Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#141

Post by freshhawk »

stakats wrote: post #101
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.

You might think a lot of things, but your description of Zotero is completely inaccurate. Zotero isn't a browser-based application, and it can do everything you describe.

No need to be a dick, anyone reading Zotero's homepage comes away with the message that this is a browser-based application only.

There is no mention anywhere of any other way of using it except on the download page.

The first time I went there I didn't click on the download button because I didn't want a browser-based app.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#142

Post by verisimilidude »

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…

There was a time when I would've been on board. But I think that time has passed. I have a wife, a new baby, and a nice day job that allows me to enjoy both.

A couple years ago, I spent many nights and weekends working on the academic publishing problem. The effort culminated in a massive hypermedia-style XML schema for distributed and inter-connected publishing, referencing, archiving, etc. There were hundreds of elements just in the common metadata model before I even got around to defining content modules.

Then something hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it was seeing backbone.js for the first time. I realized how quickly web technology was moving forward, how easy it was becoming, and, by contrast, how absolutely shitty it was going to be to write mountains of XSLT on top of my huge DTD. Even in my attempt to create something really different, my approach was still totally clouded by the prevailing anti-wisdom of the academic publishing technology community.

I realized I was on the wrong path. It was a great thought exercise that contributed immeasurably to my day work, but I had to move on.

Happy to share more information if you like, though I'd need to dig the files out of deep storage.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#143

Post by gtuckerkellogg »

rsvidal wrote: post #86
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.

We're here and ready to not be destroyed. From the looks of it at the office, it's work as usual. By that I mean, building a great tool and resource for researchers. :)

Everything I've read from folks at Mendeley misses the point of the disgust. Most people are not concerned about Mendeley going away, or about development stopping, or about new features not being added. Of course you're continuing to build the tool, at least the for the foreseeable future. Of course Mendeley will continue to be have a free version, etc. Of course Mendeley will continue to add features.

But none of that is because Elsevier has suddenly decided to support open access. It's because buying and developing Mendeley is an affordable way for Elsevier to launder its godawful reputation. All the smiling emoticons in the world don't change that.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#144

Post by simonster »

freshhawk wrote: post #141
stakats wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might think a lot of things, but your description of Zotero is completely inaccurate. Zotero isn't a browser-based application, and it can do everything you describe.

No need to be a dick, anyone reading Zotero's homepage comes away with the message that this is a browser-based application only. There is no mention anywhere of any other way of using it except on the download page. The first time I went there I didn't click on the download button because I didn't want a browser-based app.

Okay, we've tried to remove the implication that Zotero is browser-based from the website. Let us know if you have a suggestion to make things clearer. (Also, sorry stakats is a dick :)

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#145

Post by teyc »

Taking inspiration from Star Trek, a new impact factor could be invented to teleport the reputation of a known publication to an alternate publication based on the editorial board. If the board of mathematics reviewers agree to move their effort to another platform, then it follows that the reputation follows the people, not the name of the publication.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#146

Post by Crake »

onemorepassword wrote: post #99
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…

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 h…

"...and the people voting for the likes of her have been deliberately deprived of a decent education."

I really wish this were the case, but political views remain relatively static in the face of increasing levels of education. (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/college-doe... )

Unfortunately, even if we sent all the Palin-voters to college, they would still probably be convinced that Obama is a muslim, earth is 5,000 years old, etc etc. It's rather depressing to think about, since there appears to be no cure for it.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#148

Post by johnminter »

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…

Look at JabRef as a front end to bibtex. I had a bit of a learning curve, but was so frustrated with the Microsoft toolchain that I switched to R/Sweave/LaTeX/bibtex/git and am quite happy. Everything is Open Source and in general community support has been better than commercial support. Since all these are text based, they play well with version control (git). Also makes for a reproducible workflow where an entire analysis and report can be reproduced by a single click on a shell script or command file. The same toolchain works on my Linux, MacOSX, and Windows boxes.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#149

Post by mhluongo »

simonster wrote: post #68
Thrymr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jour…

> 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. Yes, this needs to happen. NIH already requires that publications arising from NIH-funded research be made publicly available 12 months after publication ( http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ). Other funding organizations really need to do this. IMHO,…

Other federal research orgs are ramping up now -> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce...

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#150

Post by mhluongo »

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…

I'm all about this sort of openness in the research process, but it seems counter to some disciplines' cultures- aren't eg, medicine and chemistry more competitive / secretive prior publication?
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