On: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

[stakats]

Sure! Zotero has been available as a standalone application for several years (and even when it only ran within Firefox in the early days, it was still a local application): http://www.zotero.org/download/

Zotero retrieves PDF metadata using a Google Scholar lookup, a method that Mendeley later adopted: http://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata

This process can also be applied to a watch folder using the third-party add-on ZotFile (Zotero supports extensions): http://www.columbia.edu/~jpl2136/zotfile.html

Zotero has always allowed all kinds of searching of metadata and content: http://www.zotero.org/support/searching

Zotero also includes notes (and these notes can be pulled from PDF annotations using ZotFile): http://www.zotero.org/support/notes