5 ms·

Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley

78 points by sadiq 14y ago

Game_Ender 14y ago
The Mendeley desktop client is a great cross platform way to manage research papers. I really hope Elsevier doesn't screw it up.
- tellarin 14y ago
  Based on my past experience with Elsevier, I would not be too hopeful. :(
  - DigitalSea 14y ago
    I haven't heard of many nice experiences with Elsevier either, here's hoping they don't mess up such a crucially useful tool.
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      Well it will surely still work great for managing Elsevier papers.
      - MrGunn 14y ago
        There will be no favoritism for Elsevier content: http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/ http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/
  - MrGunn 14y ago
    Lots of people have had bad experiences, especially this year. I was one of the people leading the charge against them, in fact. However, they were able to convince me that they really do want us for our openness and they want us to bring that to them. I didn't change my mind easily and I wouldn't expect you to either, all you have to do is consider our track record and continue to hold us up to a exactly the same high standards as before.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  As I've mentioned before, we see this as a great opportunity to focus on our users and provide an ever better tool and overall resource. More resources will mean more features faster and more attention to key projects like our open API (which will see more attention!)
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Is Zotero [1] a competitor in that space? If so, any idea how they compare? [1]: http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/
  - dmicah 14y ago
    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).
  - jamesjporter 14y ago
    I've used both and found Zotero to be miles better.
  - rsvidal 14y ago
    There are plenty of reference management tools. Papers, RefWorks, Endnote, JabRef, Zotero, colwiz, readcube, and more. Here's a comparison table at wikipedia (probably not super up-to-date but worth taking a look): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...
ElliotH 14y ago
Fingers crossed Mendeley keeps existing for the duration of my degree. It's a lifesaver.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  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!)
hkmurakami 14y ago
Desperately praying that an Oracle-style slow, suffocating death of the product doesn't ensue.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    I certainly hope that's true as well, but everyone says this at this stage. Literally everyone. And now Elsevier is in charge of your roadmap and resources. The company known mostly for profiteering, being boycotted, paying for shill reviews on Amazon, taking payouts to publish fake academic journals and being the example case of why open publishing was desperately needed. You have a tough road ahead of you PR wise. Hopefully you can deliver on these promises. I believe you are being sincere in your comments here. But I would put a lot of money on this going the way the cynics expect it to go.
gburt 14y ago
Awful.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    You may have commitment, but do you have any actual authority?
happyhappy007 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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-joining-elsevier/ http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-life/team-mendeley-is-join... If there are more questions, we have put together a couple questions and answers here: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-joins-elsevier/ http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-join... 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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
jofer 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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. :)
quanics 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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?
  - kanzure 14y ago
    > I don't think zotero is geared towards that Zotero can import pdfs and figure out metadata, just like Mendeley, except without using OCR.
  - simonster 14y ago
    Zotero can extract metadata from PDFs, but at present it can't import folder structure. We're always happy to take patches: https://github.com/zotero/zotero https://github.com/zotero/zotero
  - jamesjporter 14y ago
    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.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  You can easily synch your Zotero library into Mendeley (check preferences). Mendeley is (in my biased opinion) easier to use with a better user interface. It allows you to read, annotate, collaborate in groups, etc. Sync to the web so you can run Mendeley on multiple operating systems (and even mobile apps). While not always up-to-date, here's a large comparison table of reference management tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...
irollboozers 14y ago
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.
moron4hire 14y ago
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 14y ago
  I was almost going to feel bad that I'd never heard of either of them until I found a kindred spirit.
  - moron4hire 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
    - jamessb 14y ago
      In this case, it's 'science' not 'Silicon Valley' (Mendely's offices are in London and New York; Elsevier's headquarters are in Amsterdam). Elsevier is one of the biggest scientific publishers, with over 2,000 journals, including several with very high impact factors (eg. Cell).
- adamnemecek 14y ago
  What an insightful comment.
  - moron4hire 14y ago
    Really, because clearly I've lived under a rock to miss such influential, household name companies such as these.
streptomycin 14y ago
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.html http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-Mendeley....
- rsvidal 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
xaa 14y ago
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.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  >my lab had a huge internal debate about whether to continue using Mendeley or choose a FLOSS alternative that wouldn't bite us later. What alternatives did you consider?
  - xaa 14y ago
    The finalists were I, Librarian, Zotero, or roll-our-own.
    - MrGunn 14y ago
      See, that's the thing. It's hard for open source projects to attract top caliber developers and build a critical mass of users. Firefox has done really well, AOSP has done well, but Mendeley and Zotero are really the only competitors in this space, and they're not exactly comparable. That said, this isn't a buy and bury situation. Mendeley is now very well positioned to dominate so there's no reason to worry, and anyways you can always take your data with you. FYI - I work for Mendeley.
      - simonster 14y ago
        I'm flattered to know that you think we're the only competitors in the space. However, given that you have several times as many full-time developers as we have part-time developers and my code was/is the basis for critical features in your product, I think you're really overstating the caliber of your developers. As for your "critical mass of users" that we supposedly lack, I suggest you consult Google Insights. While I don't know the specific details of your agreement with Elsevier that make you so "well positioned to dominate," I do know that your target market's principles are more closely aligned with ours than with yours, and that they aren't stupid. You can't really preach open access for years and then sell yourself to the OA movement's greatest enemy and expect that no one will notice. In any case, I welcome the competition, although I hope that in the future it comes in the form of shipped code and not more lies about the viability of free software. FYI - I'm a member of the Zotero core team, but I'm also a graduate student in neuroscience at MIT.
Tyr42 14y ago
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?
- anusinha 14y ago
  I've heard a great deal of praise for Papers App (Windows, OS X, iOS) [1]. It'll cost you quite a bit though--$79. [1]: http://www.papersapp.com/papers/ http://www.papersapp.com/papers/
  - jamessb 14y ago
    There's a 40% discount for (undergraduate) students, making the price $47. I bought it when it was in Public Preview in '07, and love it. The ability to sync with the app on my iPad mini is really nice, as it means that I always have immediate access to any paper I might want to refer to in conversation, regardless of whether I have an Internet connection.
- odin1415 14y ago
  If you're on a Mac you should check out BibDesk.
- subsection1h 14y ago
  For Linux, OS X, and Windows: http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.colwiz.com/ http://www.colwiz.com/ For OS X and Windows: http://endnote.com/ http://endnote.com/ http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/ http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/ http://pdfstacks.com/ http://pdfstacks.com/ For OS X: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/ http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/ http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/ http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/ For Windows: http://www.biblioscape.com/ http://www.biblioscape.com/ http://www.citavi.com/ http://www.citavi.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/
quinndupont 14y ago
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.
Evbn 14y ago
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.
peterkelly 14y ago
"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 14y ago
  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-options http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option.... 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 http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-archives
  - peterkelly 14y ago
    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).
bioinformatics 14y ago
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.
impendia 14y ago
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.
atesti 14y ago
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...

78 points by sadiq 14y ago

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

tellarin 14y ago
Based on my past experience with Elsevier, I would not be too hopeful. :(
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I haven't heard of many nice experiences with Elsevier either, here's hoping they don't mess up such a crucially useful tool.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    Well it will surely still work great for managing Elsevier papers.
    - MrGunn 14y ago
      There will be no favoritism for Elsevier content: http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/ http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/
- MrGunn 14y ago
  Lots of people have had bad experiences, especially this year. I was one of the people leading the charge against them, in fact. However, they were able to convince me that they really do want us for our openness and they want us to bring that to them. I didn't change my mind easily and I wouldn't expect you to either, all you have to do is consider our track record and continue to hold us up to a exactly the same high standards as before.
rsvidal 14y ago
As I've mentioned before, we see this as a great opportunity to focus on our users and provide an ever better tool and overall resource. More resources will mean more features faster and more attention to key projects like our open API (which will see more attention!)
SkyMarshal 14y ago
Is Zotero [1] a competitor in that space? If so, any idea how they compare? [1]: http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/
- dmicah 14y ago
  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).
- jamesjporter 14y ago
  I've used both and found Zotero to be miles better.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  There are plenty of reference management tools. Papers, RefWorks, Endnote, JabRef, Zotero, colwiz, readcube, and more. Here's a comparison table at wikipedia (probably not super up-to-date but worth taking a look): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...

ElliotH 14y ago

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

rsvidal 14y ago
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!)

hkmurakami 14y ago

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

rsvidal 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  I certainly hope that's true as well, but everyone says this at this stage. Literally everyone. And now Elsevier is in charge of your roadmap and resources. The company known mostly for profiteering, being boycotted, paying for shill reviews on Amazon, taking payouts to publish fake academic journals and being the example case of why open publishing was desperately needed. You have a tough road ahead of you PR wise. Hopefully you can deliver on these promises. I believe you are being sincere in your comments here. But I would put a lot of money on this going the way the cynics expect it to go.

gburt 14y ago

Awful.

rsvidal 14y ago
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 14y ago
  You may have commitment, but do you have any actual authority?

happyhappy007 14y ago

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 14y ago
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-joining-elsevier/ http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-life/team-mendeley-is-join... If there are more questions, we have put together a couple questions and answers here: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-joins-elsevier/ http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-join... 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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

jofer 14y ago

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 14y ago
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. :)

quanics 14y ago

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 14y ago
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?
- kanzure 14y ago
  > I don't think zotero is geared towards that Zotero can import pdfs and figure out metadata, just like Mendeley, except without using OCR.
- simonster 14y ago
  Zotero can extract metadata from PDFs, but at present it can't import folder structure. We're always happy to take patches: https://github.com/zotero/zotero https://github.com/zotero/zotero
- jamesjporter 14y ago
  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.
rsvidal 14y ago
You can easily synch your Zotero library into Mendeley (check preferences). Mendeley is (in my biased opinion) easier to use with a better user interface. It allows you to read, annotate, collaborate in groups, etc. Sync to the web so you can run Mendeley on multiple operating systems (and even mobile apps). While not always up-to-date, here's a large comparison table of reference management tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...

irollboozers 14y ago

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.

moron4hire 14y ago

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 14y ago
I was almost going to feel bad that I'd never heard of either of them until I found a kindred spirit.
- moron4hire 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
  - jamessb 14y ago
    In this case, it's 'science' not 'Silicon Valley' (Mendely's offices are in London and New York; Elsevier's headquarters are in Amsterdam). Elsevier is one of the biggest scientific publishers, with over 2,000 journals, including several with very high impact factors (eg. Cell).
adamnemecek 14y ago
What an insightful comment.
- moron4hire 14y ago
  Really, because clearly I've lived under a rock to miss such influential, household name companies such as these.

streptomycin 14y ago

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.html http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-12-13-Damn-It-Mendeley....

rsvidal 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

xaa 14y ago

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.

SkyMarshal 14y ago
>my lab had a huge internal debate about whether to continue using Mendeley or choose a FLOSS alternative that wouldn't bite us later. What alternatives did you consider?
- xaa 14y ago
  The finalists were I, Librarian, Zotero, or roll-our-own.
  - MrGunn 14y ago
    See, that's the thing. It's hard for open source projects to attract top caliber developers and build a critical mass of users. Firefox has done really well, AOSP has done well, but Mendeley and Zotero are really the only competitors in this space, and they're not exactly comparable. That said, this isn't a buy and bury situation. Mendeley is now very well positioned to dominate so there's no reason to worry, and anyways you can always take your data with you. FYI - I work for Mendeley.
    - simonster 14y ago
      I'm flattered to know that you think we're the only competitors in the space. However, given that you have several times as many full-time developers as we have part-time developers and my code was/is the basis for critical features in your product, I think you're really overstating the caliber of your developers. As for your "critical mass of users" that we supposedly lack, I suggest you consult Google Insights. While I don't know the specific details of your agreement with Elsevier that make you so "well positioned to dominate," I do know that your target market's principles are more closely aligned with ours than with yours, and that they aren't stupid. You can't really preach open access for years and then sell yourself to the OA movement's greatest enemy and expect that no one will notice. In any case, I welcome the competition, although I hope that in the future it comes in the form of shipped code and not more lies about the viability of free software. FYI - I'm a member of the Zotero core team, but I'm also a graduate student in neuroscience at MIT.

Tyr42 14y ago

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?

anusinha 14y ago
I've heard a great deal of praise for Papers App (Windows, OS X, iOS) [1]. It'll cost you quite a bit though--$79. [1]: http://www.papersapp.com/papers/ http://www.papersapp.com/papers/
- jamessb 14y ago
  There's a 40% discount for (undergraduate) students, making the price $47. I bought it when it was in Public Preview in '07, and love it. The ability to sync with the app on my iPad mini is really nice, as it means that I always have immediate access to any paper I might want to refer to in conversation, regardless of whether I have an Internet connection.
odin1415 14y ago
If you're on a Mac you should check out BibDesk.
subsection1h 14y ago
For Linux, OS X, and Windows: http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.colwiz.com/ http://www.colwiz.com/ For OS X and Windows: http://endnote.com/ http://endnote.com/ http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/ http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/ http://pdfstacks.com/ http://pdfstacks.com/ For OS X: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/ http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/ http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html http://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/SenteForMac.html http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/ http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/ For Windows: http://www.biblioscape.com/ http://www.biblioscape.com/ http://www.citavi.com/ http://www.citavi.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/ http://www.qiqqa.com/

quinndupont 14y ago

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.

Evbn 14y ago

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.

peterkelly 14y ago

"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 14y ago
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-options http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option.... 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 http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-archives
- peterkelly 14y ago
  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).

bioinformatics 14y ago

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.

impendia 14y ago

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.

atesti 14y ago

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...