
Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover - pms
http://paidcontent.org/2013/04/09/the-empire-acquires-the-rebel-alliance-mendeley-users-revolt-against-elsevier-takeover/
======
cs702
Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video:
[http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-
monetize-y...](http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-
your-audience/) \-- one slide shown in the background, in particular, makes me
cringe and laugh at the same time: "Only sell your users to whoever has the
deepest pockets."

PS. More seriously, I've come to feel that only a non-profit organization can
solve the "walled garden" problem in academic publishing. We need something
like a "Mozilla Foundation for Science" -- an organization dedicated, not to
maximize profits for shareholders, but _to keep power over scientific research
in people’s hands_.

~~~
onemorepassword
_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.

What has undermined public/private solutions is not public opinion or
political ideology, but greed, lobbying and corruption. A foundation is
nothing but a workaround, and foundations have a history of getting corrupted
by the greed and delusions of grandure of its administrators.

It's time we address the real problem. The legacy of thousands of years of
civilization is being stolen from us.

~~~
spindritf
> 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
release that "legacy" (vide Aaron Swartz), not Elsevier's.

It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a
paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it)
who enforce the rules stopping others from competing.

~~~
freshhawk
> It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a
> paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it)
> who enforce the rules stopping others from competing

Because we're not 15 year olds who just read Atlas Shrugged?

------
hack_edu
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 stats, the price of online access per
user often works out to several dollars per search...

This is why I've given up trying to work in the field or found a company in
the sector... Anyone with an idea and need a technical cofounder? ;)

~~~
pms
I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific
papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and
reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their
reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than
posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when
scientists get angry because of bad reviews, and try to revenge on their
reviewers, it should be at least in the first years anonymous. The reviews
would be voluntary, and also would be rated, just like answers to question in
SO. I am a scientist, and I know that reviews have very low quality because of
many reasons, such system could perhaps help improving the reviews, while
keeping the reviewing process automatized, and reducing its cost to the
minimum. In fact, costs of storing papers are low (Arxiv), reviews are free
(nobody pays to the scientists anyway, they do it for the community and
reputation), and the only cost that is high is the cost of managing the
reviews. But if reviews could be automatized then we have a system that is as
cheap as Arxiv is, and peer-reviewed :)

In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and
eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of
time though to popularize it.

What do you think? Could this be done?

~~~
rrrrtttt
Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back
scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the
community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with
a voluntary system.

~~~
pms
Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the
papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them
and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way
useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it
by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.

~~~
rrrrtttt
Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the
"coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other
people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers
reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to
do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we
have now.

~~~
pms
Well, the coercive component is the unified reputation that you gain in this
site, just like the reputation that you gain in SO. Obviously, the higher
reputation you have, the more recognizable you are and more people read about
what you do.

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1337biz
I don't get it. It was absolutely clear that they were using a propiretory
software owned by a for-profit company.

There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero
et al.

~~~
hemmer
I really like the way Mendeley handles notes, specifically highlighting /
annotating PDFs. Do you know of any alternatives that include this? I was
planning on writing my own at some point but it might be a bit ambitious.

~~~
snowwindwaves
check out quicka (spelled qiqqa) <http://www.qiqqa.com>

I chose it a few months ago over mendeley because it allowed me to search in
the PDF annotations, which isn't possible with mendeley. I recall mendeley
could search notes added to a PDF file (one text area for the whole file), but
not within sticky notes attached to specific pages, so it was impossible to
search the annotations I made and also have those annotations appear on the
relevant part of the PDF.

The other thing I like about qiqqa is that it allows us to have a shared
library on our local server, instead of having to send all our data to the
cloud.

Both are great desktop tools for full text search across many PDF files, even
those that need OCR. Before I was using google desktop for this function, and
qiqqa is definitely a step up.

~~~
hemmer
This looks great, however Windows only is a bit of a deal breaker. Definitely
going to keep my eye on it though.

------
Osmium
My own personal favourite, Papers (papersapp.com), was recently taken over by
Springer too. So far, so good--the original team is still running it and
there's no sign anything bad will come of it, but I'm still wary of the
future.

~~~
treerex
Of course Springer has one of the most onerous paywalls I've come across. I
hadn't heard of the Papers acquisition: I use it on my iPad but only because
it sucks less than every other solution I've looked at.

~~~
twog
What do you think can be done to improve it? Can you tell me what your ideal
reference/citation software looks like?

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Pitarou
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.

:-(

~~~
bmalee
Honestly? It's a for-profit company, whose interests did you think was
serving?

~~~
Pitarou
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.

~~~
bmalee
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.

~~~
jessriedel
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.

------
ig1
There's a slight irony that this news story is being posted on a site which is
partially owned by Elsevier.

~~~
redblacktree
Just like the irony of "I hate Facebook" post on Facebook.

------
Osiris
We've come a long way when a "revolt" means "users post their frustrations on
Twitter".

~~~
Crake
A long way indeed, and mostly in a terrible direction. :/

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asdf333
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.

~~~
rsvidal
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. :)

~~~
gtuckerkellogg
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.

------
Jun8
Hah, this was exactly the reason I was hesitating to use Mendeley, although
it's got great tools. Creating your paper database in such a system is a
_huge_ investment in time, it's hard and very frustrating to move between such
systems.

AFAIK, the open source tools cannot much the maturity of Mendeley, am I wrong?
In this age and time, how hard can it be to clone a service like that?

~~~
mjn
It depends on what parts you're using. If you're using Mendeley mainly as a
personal reference manager, Zotero is as good as Mendeley or better imo. But
it doesn't have a web-based social layer like Mendeley does, for people who
like that part.

~~~
jessriedel
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.

~~~
stakats
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.

~~~
freshhawk
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.

~~~
simonster
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 :)

~~~
freshhawk
That's great news, I'm sure Zotero is getting a traffic bump these days.

------
parennoob
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 backing up the raw data / generated
databases so they can be recovered later.

~~~
johnminter
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.

------
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.

------
kriro
Ideologically I feel like every tax funded researcher (i.e. the vast majority)
has an obligation to make all his work publicly accessible.

Change will happen once open access journals get A level status. If there's
enough that are sufficiently peer reviewed a simple legislative fix (for state
funded/supported education which is the case for most forms of education)
would be to treat open access publications preferential when it comes to
hireing new academic staff.

As someone with the long term vision of massive changes in education towards
e-learning I think the way to attack this is to actually couple OA initiatives
with sites like coursera, edx etc.

How deep are the Buffet/Gates pockets, maybe just buying up a bunch of content
and freeing it might be the easiest path.

~~~
Someone
Buying up a bunch of content? Gates already did that decades ago:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis>

There's no sign of freeing it, though.

------
rurounijones
While I am not a researcher and have never used Mendeley et al I do know about
Elsevier's reputation.

As mentioned in this blog it would seem the wisest thing would be to switch
for the moment and keep an eye on mendeley.

Who knows, maybe they really will change Elsevier, I doubt it but you never
know.

After all, given the backlash Elsevier know this is their ONE (long-haul)
chance to redeem themselves. Screw this up and they are totally beyond hope
(For those who might not think they already are)

------
whyenot
Ok, then I'll use Papers!

 _Papers purchased by Sinauer in early 2013_

... Endnote?

 _part of Thompson-Reuters_

Zotero?

 _free and open, backed by a major non-profit organization_

------
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.

------
jccalhoun
mendeley has always been closed source for-profit. They may have gotten a new
owner but it isn't like they were ever doing it for altruistic reasons.

Hopefully this will be good news for zotero which is open source.

And hopefully it will be really bad news for endnote which is one of the worst
commercial programs I've ever tried to use.

------
cantankerous
It could be that Elsevier is pivoting into an open access model through its
other efforts and buying up Mendeley. I won't hold my breath, though. The
model, while evolving, could just morph into something else that sucks.

It's a real bummer. There's so much good stuff locked up in these publishing
houses.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
If Elsivier wants to change its business model, it will need to do it in a way
that doesn't completely cannibalize its sales. Adding open research companies
to its umbrella would be a way to do that.

However, more likely, it wants to be able to say, "See, we are committed to
being open", and continue with its primarily closed practices.

------
driverdan
Reminds me of macrobreweries buying microbreweries. The big guys (who make
terrible beer) come in and cut costs anywhere they can to increase margins.
This includes using cheaper ingredients which decreases the quality of the
beer.

The same will happen here.

------
denzil_correa
I am quite disappointed by this - the next target which hasn't been really
picked up yet is Academia.edu though it's purpose is slightly different than
Mendeley.

<http://academia.edu/>

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shared4you
How to export, delete and move your Mendeley account:
<http://duncan.hull.name/2013/01/18/mendelete/>

------
profpjm
revolt, takeover. reminds me of the mutiny post
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525173>

------
youngerdryas
"this is like Halliburton buying Greenpeace"

Sounds about right.

~~~
rsvidal
Yeah, Greenpeace is a VC funded for-profit company. Yeah, good analogy. :-)

