Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true, it seemed like a fairly pro-openness company, which not only said the right things but seemed to have a lot of employees genuinely committed to improving the state of academic literature. But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofi…
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.
Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.