
Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley - sadiq
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-bought-mendeley-for-69m-100m-to-expand-open-social-education-data-efforts/
======
happyhappy007
Quoting one of the comments from Techcrunch which I think should be upvoted:

"disgraceful that they spent their whole life as a company arguing that they
were the next big thing in open publishing only to sell out to the most
unethical monolith in closed publishing out there. no doubt el$evier will
enjoy slowly ripping apart what's left of mendeley and continuing with its
centuries-old business model of making money off the back of researchers'
freely provided knowledge.

nice to see your true colours team mendeley!"

~~~
rsvidal
I don't want to comment on a comment, so I'd prefer to point you to Mendeley's
official blog post on this topic here: [http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-
life/team-mendeley-is-join...](http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-life/team-
mendeley-is-joining-elsevier/)

If there are more questions, we have put together a couple questions and
answers here: [http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-
join...](http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-joins-
elsevier/)

Finally, if there are still lingering questions, we're more than happy to
answer them here or directly with us on twitter @rvidal / @mendeley_com /
@mendeleysupport And there's always email: support@mendeley.com :)

~~~
zorpner
Do you really not understand how fundamentally anti-open-access Elsevier is?
Have you not seen what happens to the other companies they absorb? Many of us
have experience in this particular field and it's not a pleasant one.

Your official blog post is inane marketing-speak that has no basis in the
reality of the damage Elsevier has done and continues to do to the fabric of
science publishing. Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be
ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be
effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open
access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.

~~~
freshhawk
I have a feeling people aren't going to wait a year to start on an open
replacement given the cartoonishly awful reputation Elsevier has.

~~~
kenko
Cartoonish is right.

Not only are they horribly exploitative towards the academics and librarians
who by and large both write and purchase what Elsevier publishes, they also
... sponsor arms fairs! whee!

------
xaa
God damn it. After the recent MySQL/OpenOffice/Java and Google Reader fiascos,
my lab had a huge internal debate about whether to continue using Mendeley or
choose a FLOSS alternative that wouldn't bite us later. Obviously we
miscalculated.

I don't blame the Mendeley team -- too much -- since $100M is a lot of money.
Although they shouldn't try to pretend that this isn't a complete sellout.

The fault really lies in the community's willingness to fall over and over for
these shiny but not-quite-free alternatives. Two years ago, I would have said
that Stallman is a nut; now, I think he's quite right.

~~~
Evbn
"Two years ago"? Everyone's complete inability to remember anything is why
Stallman hasn't gotten his point across in the past 30 years.

~~~
xaa
It isn't quite so simple -- usually you pay for the flexibility and freedom of
FOSS with a significantly less polished UX.

In an ideal world, everyone would pool their resources toward free software
and all would benefit. In reality, it is like a multiplayer Prisoners'
Dilemma: people who "defect" by using proprietary software are rewarded (in
the short term) with a nicer UX, at the expense of those who "cooperate", and
at their own long-term expense.

There are other problems: FOSS (especially Linux) suffers from severe
fragmentation, and I also question to what extent people are willing to
develop software that is not fun for free.

Anyway, I never "forgot" the excesses of, say, Y2K-era Microsoft. I have just
been skeptical of the workability of FOSS. But I do think it is the ethical
way to go.

~~~
jasonlotito
> I also question to what extent people are willing to develop software that
> is not fun for free.

Pay them to develop the features you want rather than pay the cost of using
proprietary software or closed systems.

Everyone wins.

------
jofer
While Mendeley certainly has me hooked on their desktop client, I'm not sure
I've ever understood their social aspects...

I'm very, very, very skeptical, but this could wind up being a good thing.
Elsevier can't entirely make it a "walled garden" just due to the nature of
research. Mendeley may not have been able to make their business model work
alone. Finally, some of Elsevier's search tools are actually quite nice.
Seeing them integrated into Mendeley could be very useful.

I just hope they don't smother/abandon the desktop side of it. Currently,
Mendeley is the best cross-platform research paper manager, i.m.o. I'd really,
really hate to see them drop linux support, but I'm worried that it's somewhat
likely.

~~~
rsvidal
Integration of Mendeley with Elsevier's Scopus and ScienceDirect is very much
on the roadmap. The desktop app is going to continue to see more attention.
Some great features coming to our next release. We've totally rewritten the
iOS app and will be working on an official Android client soon too. Support
for win/linux/mac is to continue too. :)

------
irollboozers
There are a lot of mixed emotions with the confirmation of the rumors that
have been floating around for a while now. On the one hand, it's a huge
positive sign of just how desperate the dying giants are to protect their
business. On the other hand, it's Elsevier.

Regardless, huge congrats to the Mendeley team.

------
Tyr42
I'm curious, since I was just starting research and was going to need a tool
like this, what options are there? I've already used Mendeley a bit, but that
was before I really needed a serious bibliography, so I didn't use most of the
features. What else is out there in a similar vein?

~~~
subsection1h
For Linux, OS X, and Windows:

<http://www.zotero.org/>

<http://www.colwiz.com/>

For OS X and Windows:

<http://endnote.com/>

<http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/>

<http://pdfstacks.com/>

For OS X:

<http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/>

<http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html>

<http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html>

<http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/>

For Windows:

<http://www.biblioscape.com/>

<http://www.citavi.com/>

<http://www.qiqqa.com/>

~~~
jamesjporter
+1 for Zotero, its the bees knees.

------
Game_Ender
The Mendeley desktop client is a great cross platform way to manage research
papers. I really hope Elsevier doesn't screw it up.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Is Zotero [1] a competitor in that space? If so, any idea how they compare?

[1]: <http://www.zotero.org/>

~~~
dmicah
Zotero has a desktop app in addition to their original Firefox extension.
Personally, I've been very happy with it. I have my articles stored in
JungleDisk, and everything syncs between mac laptop, windows desktop, and ipad
(with ZotPad on the ipad).

------
hkmurakami
Desperately praying that an Oracle-style slow, suffocating death of the
product doesn't ensue.

~~~
rsvidal
We certainly don't hope that this is the case. We are very much excited at the
opportunity this is providing us to focus on our userbase. We have an action
packed roadmap set ahead of us and the resources now available to us will
allow us to work faster on implementing the many features we have planned.

~~~
rurounijones
I hate to sound rude but.."Hope"?!

Surely you have some ironclad clauses saying that the product cannot be killed
or something along those lines?

Otherwise your roadmap is pointless since you do not control it anymore.

~~~
rsvidal
Ok, you are reading too strongly into my words. I was trying to keep a light
tone. I apologize if that wasn't what came across. Anyhow, we do control our
roadmap and we have plenty of exciting work ahead of us.

------
atesti
Can I use it offline? My wife installed it a long time ago and never signed up
for an account. Back then offline usage seemed to be possible. I copied her
profile to her new laptop and it never required signing up which is great (why
on earth would she put her literature database in the internet??? The tool
shall just index the papers on her harddrive).

When I wanted to install Mendeley desktop for my brother, it was impossible to
start it without an account. Is that on purpose? Can it be skipped?

I just backuped a fresh download before Mendeley gets modified more, but I
wonder whether I have to take her profile to seed a new computer so that it
gets running without internet access.

Of course it's quite obvious that Mendeley or Elsevier have no interest in
supporting anybody who wants to just USE the programm, instead this social
stuff shall be pushed...

------
bioinformatics
The most interesting part of this disucssion is to see Mendeley "staff" doing
their damage control over the backslash of the sale. I don't think the
scientific community will continue use the tool, they will just migrate.

------
quinndupont
and... a great reason to switch to Zotero if you haven't already. Elsevier has
rightly earned the mire of academics around the world, and I'm sure they'll
continue that path with their acquisition of Mendeley.

------
streptomycin
Well, this is what you get when you rely on non-free software.

But hopefully Elsevier can at least put some decent software engineers on it
to make it somewhat less excruciating to use, e.g.
[http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-
Mendeley....](http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-
Mendeley.html)

~~~
rsvidal
Sorry to read that you had issues with Mendeley. A quick look at that link and
I can see that many of the issues you highlight are related to citation
styles. We have made some good progress there with our citation style editor.
We have also made plenty of improvements since that post. If you felt that
some of the problems were limiting your research, we have a support team
(support@mendeley.com) and also points of contact on twitter (if that's your
thing). As for software engineers, we have a very talented and expert team but
we are proud to say that we will be adding to the team soon so that we can
improve and iterate more rapidly and solidly.

~~~
streptomycin
It's not really about citation styles, it's more about metadata.

That being said, it looks a bit better after testing for 2 minutes. Journal
names seem more consistent when importing from Pubmed (although they are all
in sentence case still..). Still seeing publisher cities stuck in the Journal
field in some cases. Still seeing some hilariously botched names like "Smith,
J Q John Q" instead of "Smith, John Q", though. All these issues make it
infeasible for me to use for citations in my papers.

And can I ask one question... whose idea was it to put journal names in
sentence case rather than title case? I have never seen it done anywhere else,
and it just seems bizarre.

And I am sure you do have good software engineers, but at the same time, I and
others have been using it for years and the consistency in references has just
been so laughable for so long that it almost boggles the mind. Best of luck
towards figuring it out. I still do use Mendeley for PDF reading and note
taking.

------
quanics
As someone who has been a longtime longtime Zotero user is there any good
reason for me to check out Mendeley? I played with it once awhile back, but
not enough to get a good feel for it. Zotero worked well, and continues to
work well for me. Are there different use cases for one vs. the other that I
might be missing?

~~~
jofer
If you have lots of pdf's on your hard drive that you want to automatically
extract metadata from (or organize), it's quite nice. It's easy to go from
nested folders of pdf's --> Mendeley --> bibtex file, with a reasonably
minimal amount of quality control.

I may be misremembering, but I don't think zotero is geared towards that?

~~~
jamesjporter
FWIW I prefer Zotero because I find downloading the pdf to actually be rather
annoying. I just save the citation and double click on it to open the article
in my browser whenever I need it. No metadata extraction necessary b/c Zotero
pulls metadata from a doi or PMID (which is a quick copy and paste from the
web) and unsurprisingly does it much better than Mendely pulls metadata from
pdfs.

------
gburt
Awful.

~~~
rsvidal
No, it isn't. We're still committed as ever to producing a great research tool
and resource for our users. We will keep pushing for that and will certainly
accelerate the pace with more resources.

~~~
waterlesscloud
You may have commitment, but do you have any actual authority?

------
impendia
Dear rsvidal,

Congratulations and I wish you the best of luck.

As you can infer from the comments here, please keep in mind (as you no doubt
already understand) that Elsevier is widely mistrusted and nobody is willing
to take them at their word. Indeed, with 13,385 of my colleagues I am a proud
signatory to the Elsevier boycott.

Regardless of whether Elsevier is an "evil" company or not, they are mostly
engaged in rent seeking rather than wealth creation, and I am convinced that
academia will be better off without them than with them.

However, organizations can and do change, as you acknowledge in your blog
post. You have a difficult road ahead of you. I wish you the best of luck. I
have never used Mendeley, but it sounds like you have enormous power to do
good if you succeed.

------
peterkelly
"While not all of its moves or business models have been universally embraced,
it is also a hugely relevant, dynamic force in global publishing and
research."

That's great.

But I'm still not going to hand over copyrights to my work for zero
compensation so they can be "published" behind a paywall that benefits only
Elsevier.

~~~
Someone
Elsevier does have open access journals and does allow you to pay to have your
article be open access in some/many of its journals:
[http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-
option...](http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-options).

Yes, it isn't as easy as the BSD or GPL licenses, and I bet there are some
warts, but it definitely is not true that "publish with Elsevier" implies
"lock behind paywall".

Also, lots of 'old' content appears to be freely available:
<http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-archives>

~~~
peterkelly
_Elsevier does have open access journals and does allow you to pay to have
your article be open access in some/many of its journals_

Ok that's good, I wasn't aware of that. I don't mind paying (reasonable)
publication fees to cover their costs - my main priority is maintaining
copyright over my work and having the ability to make it publicly available
under a creative commons license or similar (and freely redistributable, not
just available from my personal homepage).

------
ElliotH
Fingers crossed Mendeley keeps existing for the duration of my degree. It's a
lifesaver.

~~~
rsvidal
We're in it for the long run. So no worries. I also need it to finish my
degree, so there's that too! :) (Btw, notice that you now have double
storage!)

------
Evbn
Here's hoping they take that $100 million and build a better product to
replace Mendelay.

That's how you stick it to The Man. With his own money.

------
moron4hire
What has done what to what? Neither of these names have any meaning to me.
This is literally the first I am hearing of either.

~~~
ante_annum
I was almost going to feel bad that I'd never heard of either of them until I
found a kindred spirit.

~~~
moron4hire
I finally came to terms with this about a year ago. On HN, you're going to see
the soap opera version of silicon valley. Necessarily, most elements are going
to be blown way out of proportion just to justify a narrative. Without the
narrative, what hope do the rest of these poor slobs have of catching the huge
attention their VCs want to make them feel fuzzy and warm about their fuggly
valuations?

~~~
ante_annum
As someone who a) doesn't live in SV, and b) doesn't work for a startup, I
miss a lot of the inner plot that happens in the HN narrative.

