> Mendeley went full on Evil
Could you explain what happened with mendeley? I've been using it for a while, and didn't notice anything different really.
They locked down the SQLite database so that you couldn't use it with 3rd party tools (such as your own commands, or to export). I am not sure if this got reversed, but at the time it was what triggered me to switch to Zotero. (Still using Zotero, which does everything I need it to.)
One thing I like a lot about Zotero is that they charge a subscription once you get over a certain amount of cloud storage, which gives me more confidence that they'll continue to exist in the future.
Yes, the DB was encrypted for no good reason except that locking users. Funnily enough at that point Mendeley could import from Zorero but Zotero could not import anymore. Thanks to Greydon Gilmore and GDB, I was able to get out: https://blog-academic.greydongilmore.com/phd_related/mendele...
Hypothetically speaking: going to scihub, pirating an Elsevier paper, and then uploading proof that you had done so to an Elsevier cloud account doesn't strike me as the brightest of moves.
Not in the sense that I think you are guaranteed to see consequences, or in the sense that I've actually heard about it actually going sideways, but to my intuition it does seem like the kind of thing that might attract one of those "pay us $10k or we sue you for $10M" letters down the line.
Mendeley joined the Elsevier "Family." Elsevier is one of the big three making massive amounts of money by selling content they receive for free, paid for by the tax payer or non-profits.
I strongly believe, that this has greatly contributed to the "Joe Roganization" of the pandemic, hiding true science and research, often created under the auspices of governmental research trusts, behind a paywall. Anyone not in academia (where Elsevier charges hundreds of thousands to institutions to give their researchers access to their own papers) is more or less SOL and gets their data from Joe Rogan.
In that vain, Elsevier has a tight control on the app now. Zotero has the ability to find the open access version of a paper, Elsevier will always link to the paywalled version on its own servers. Zotero has (and Mendeley had) the ability to export libraries, and with that data, Elsevier removed that when they took over Mendeley development. And, worst of all, Zotero can run standalone, Mendeley now requires an Elsevier ID login. The company actively analyzes your reading data and advertises other Elsevier properties based on your interests and reading habits.
This is academia. It should be open and accessible. Elsevier is doing everything they can to change that. And Mendeley is one weapon in their arsenal.
The Joe Rogan part makes no sense to me. Only a fraction of the listeners of the podcast would otherwise go out of their way to read primary science journal articles. Reading those is a skill and requires background knowledge to be able to read between the lines, shared context between experts etc. Scientific articles aren't written for a lay audience.
Try adding one of those papers to Mendeley. Or, for that matter, get it by request from the author. Legal and often fast. Add that. See what Mendeley does with the CiteRef.DOI and CiteRef.URI fields...
There should only be one canonical DOI for any given article though--that's the whole point! I think the URI is also supposed to be to the "version of record" rather than wherever you happened to find a copy.
Are we talking about Mendeley or the general Elsevier paywalls? Seems like you are complaining about several issues at once: Mendeley's restricted features, Elsevier's paywall (that can be relevant even for non Mendeley users) and JoeRoganization, by which I guess you mean that his guests don't always confirm mainstream expert consensus (The Science).
Mendeley changes certain fields on import to always download its abstract PDF as the reference paper with a link to its paywall. In essence, those things are PDF archivers and citation managers rolled into one. If I were to send you my latest research and you'd import it into Zotero, you'd get a managed citation and my paper. In Mendeley you'd get a managed citation and a downloaded abstract version with CrossRef to their paywall.
The reason this happens is Elsevier's business model. And this business model both really wrecked Mendeley and, I believe, contributes to medical misinformation being more dominant in the world.
But Joe Rogan listeners aren't using Mendeley. These issues are separate, but you're angry at both and are somehow mixing them. The paywall can be circumvented via sci-hub. And more and more papers are now on biorxiv and similar.
And I don't think medical misinfo has much to do with Elsevier or academia. It's human nature, and the quality and degree of evidence-basedness of official communications doesn't really help.
Also, the words "misinformation" and "fact check" make my skin crawl.
If your conclusion is that the plebs is so dumb because they listen to Joe Rogan instead of The Science(TM), I think you're just digging in deeper.
Also, during the pandemic, many blue check Twitter accounts said it's a pity that so many conspiracy theorists and fake news believers are reading papers and playing around with data. They should just receive The Science, spoon-fed, and accept it, and too much thinking and reading hurts them. In other words, think about what you wish for. When other people are given access to data, they may reach different conclusions than the approved respectable media expert consensus.
Not defending Elsevier's practices, but people who get their information about the pandemic etc. from Joe Rogan are probably not going to read (or even understand) a research paper from an academic/medical journal. The problem with misinformation isn't lack of access - there are plenty of accessible, high quality articles that are written for the layperson - the problem is that people are reading (either through choice or The Algorithm) misleading and sensationalised tabloid clickbait.
My best guess is, the influence of non-specialists who do research on their own, without the training to understand which papers are meaningful, which are fluff, which are wrong, and which are fraudulent.
The most informative papers are often behind a paywall, so the non-paywalled papers are biased towards these other less-informative and even wrong papers.
If someone should point to paper X, in order to correct a mistaken belief discussed in a public form (like HN), and that paper X cost $50 to read, many fewer people will read it to examine the validity of the paper in the first place - even if were correct.
While if someone points to paper Y, which supports that belief due to subtly wrong assumptions, but that paper is free to read, then many more people are likely to look at it. And without the training or experience to identify the wrong assumptions.
None of this requires our "Joe Rogan" to hide true science and research - paywalls already do that.
For him it's probably sufficient to just use a heavily-biased selection of it and/or present a heavily-distorted version of its results. (As others in the thread have pointed out, the hiding is done efficiently enough by others, i.e. the heavily-paywalled scientific journals.)
I think that was much more caused by media trying to prime people with some ridiculous stories that at least some refused to believe. A simple but honest approach is preferred to what we read in media otherwise.
Honestly, I am starting to think the open source movement has done as much harm as the subscription model to the scientific information ecosystem. The incentives are so high now to get volume published in pay to publish journals, leading to rushed peer reviews. Also APCs skew who can publish 'well'. The APCs for some top Cell and SpringerNature journals are about ten thousand fucking dollars. Great that the public can access it but that's money that either doesn't go to research or has to come out of taxpayer funded grants and straight into the pockets of publishers with huge margins. OA has also spawned a massive predatory journal market.
> Honestly, I am starting to think the open source movement has done as much harm as the subscription model to the scientific information ecosystem. The incentives are so high now to get volume published in pay to publish journals, leading to rushed peer reviews.
What does that have to do with Open Source?
> Also APCs skew who can publish 'well'. The APCs for some top Cell and SpringerNature journals are about ten thousand fucking dollars.
What are APCs? (Are they perhaps what relates to Open Source here?)
> Great that the public can access it but that's money that either doesn't go to research or has to come out of taxpayer funded grants and straight into the pockets of publishers with huge margins. OA has also spawned a massive predatory journal market.
But even ten thousand fucking dollars sounds a lot less than what those publishers are making now, so isn't it still much better?
oof -- that should have read 'open access' and was intended to pertain specifically to the scientific publishing ecosystem. my bad.
APCs are article processing charges. They are the fees the author (or sometimes the institution, if they have negotiated a blanket deal for all of their researchers) pay the publisher in exchange for the article being made open access.
> But even ten thousand fucking dollars sounds a lot less than what those publishers are making now, so isn't it still much better?
Publishers wouldn't be transitioning so many journal to Open Access if it was hurting their bottom line, and the for-profit academic publishing industry is about as profitable as they come with margins approaching 50%. They can do it under the guise of a principled stand. But it can create some perverse incentives. Also, previously they made money from subscription fees, so the bargaining power of whole university systems would negotiate rates. Now it for the most part falls to individual researchers, who don't have that economy of scale type bargaining power, which removes that check on inflation. A few Uni systems have cut similar deals to cover APCs for their faculty as I mentioned earlier, but it isn't yet the norm. /rant
So now the scientists get to PAY to be published?!?
Holy shit. If all this is for "peer review", it's time to scrap how they get that and develop a whole new peer review system.
(Are the Swedish Academy's science committees so superficial that they just compare citation numbers for awarding Nobel prizes? If not, what system do they use -- and why aren't they open sourcing it?)
Yeah increasingly scientists have to pay. It has become the 'principled' thing to make the publishers richer in the name of open access. Sometimes there are waivers for researchers from developing countries. Unfortunately funding bodies haven't universally caught up to the expanded $ needs. Nor have institutions.
There is a model with journals like PeerJ with relatively cheap APCs and a deal where you could sign up for a life membership and publish there indefinitely (but I think coauthors would need to as well). They also only publish based on scientific merit and aren't selective on 'impact', which is good. However, that means they aren't seen as prestigious, so you can't exactly build a career and get promotions going that route.
RE: peer review, in part bc of disruptions due to COVID journal editors have been having a harder time getting people to volunteer to peer review. There has been a lot of talk about moving to a model where reviewers get paid, but again that seems like it would set up some perverse incentives.
RE: Nobel, I don't think it is about citations, pretty sure the judge the impact of a particular body of work/discovery/contribution, qualitatively.
> RE: Nobel, I don't think it is about citations, pretty sure the judge the impact of a particular body of work/discovery/contribution, qualitatively.
Yeah, I pretty much knew (or at least assumed) that. My question was more a half-facetious way of saying academia in general should also do it that way in stead of continuing the current stupidly simplistic quest for journal citation counts.
Sure, I know nobody can afford to invest the same kind of work for every one of the millions of papers produced each year as the Nobel committee does for a few potential laureates. So it would have to be some kind of distributed system, based on the whole international scientific collective... An adaptation of the Slashdot rating system, or something? :-)
In addition to the other responses to this question, they also got rid of their browser plugins that let you quickly add arxiv pages/pdfs/etc in one click with automatic metadata detection. Worked from any browser on Android and desktop. I've yet to find anything like it.
They got bought by Elsevier who I don't trust for a moment and they are pushing some weird social media angles and the whole thing smells of proprietary vendor lock in, walled-garden etc. Zotero is much more hacker-friendly.
