14 ms·

Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

275 points by pms 14y ago

cs702 14y ago
Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-your-audience/ http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-y... -- 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.
- roadnottaken 14y ago
  It's called PLOS: http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    > 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.
    - bmalee 14y ago
      There's a difference between a for-profit company with a government-backed monopoly, and a not-for-profit organisation with government support (of which there are already many examples). I don't think anyone here blames companies for putting up a paywall or doing something else to maximise their profits; it's why they exist. However, we do recognise that this is not always an ideal state of affairs. A public sector body is one way to remove the profit requirement; private-sector not-for-profit organisations are also a possibility (but have to worry more about where their funding comes from).
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - jbooth 14y ago
      So you're arguing that because the government has a monopoly on force, anything bad that happens anywhere in the US is their fault because it's their guns backing up the law? Laws happen because a variety of agents (lobbyists, legislators, public interest groups) push for them. They're not enacted by some amorphous specter of 'government'.
    - rplacd 14y ago
      > The government is the entity which created the problem. And it acts as an extension of "the people" as the entity providing oversight and regulation in this example as well. That it doesn't happen in real life is evidence of subversion of an ideal, rather than some inherent truth.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology? The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is. Science is more expensive than software, though, and therein lies the rub.
    - Thrymr 14y ago
      Science is already funded, in very large part, by the federal government (in the US). The research is already subject to political pressures, here we're just talking about the (much smaller) amount that goes towards publications. Federal grants are going to fund research, the results of which are locked up behind the paywalls of proprietary journals (grant dollars even pay for the privilege of publishing in some journals). Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research.
      - omnisci 14y ago
        This is exactly what I'm working on. Also, publications by federally funded grants are required to be made public as well (for 1 year). However, even doing that, you are still stuck behind the political pressures, journal bias, and the peer review system which...for a lack of a better term, sucks. Science needs to be transparent and made available in real time. This is the whole purpose of science, to freely distribute knowledge for the well being of humanity. I honestly believe that and I'm working to bring that transparency to science as we speak.
      - simonster 14y ago
        > Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research. Yes, this needs to happen. NIH already requires that publications arising from NIH-funded research be made publicly available 12 months after publication (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). Other funding organizations really need to do this. IMHO, they should also require that publications be made publicly available immediately upon acceptance and provide incentives for "gold" open access (where the article is immediately made available on the publisher's website).
- tomrod 14y ago
  Know any donors? I'd love to be involved in a project like this. I wonder if the Wikimedia foundation would be interested--that would do a lot to get over the network effect advantages JSTOR and Elsevier already have. Additionally, I think that until academic publishing has a standard browser-based solution (MathML, MathJax + Pandoc + LaTeX) outside of PDF that the costs will be prohibitively expensive.
  - simonster 14y ago
    JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.
    - tomrod 14y ago
      There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access. JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.
      - mjn 14y ago
        For the non-free content on JSTOR, I don't see much that another archive could do about it. The main issue is back issues of journals published between 1923 and now-ish. Future content could go open access directly online, in which case JSTOR doesn't even really enter into the picture. And JSTOR has already made all the older, public-domain content freely available. But in between, there is almost a century of copyrighted content controlled by the journals. JSTOR scans the paper journals, but can only make the PDFs available with agreement of the copyright holder. They could try to pressure them more, e.g. by threatening to evict journals from JSTOR if the journal doesn't agree to certain minimum licensing requirements. But they don't ultimately control that content themselves.
      - simonster 14y ago
ig1 14y ago
There's a slight irony that this news story is being posted on a site which is partially owned by Elsevier.
- redblacktree 14y ago
  Just like the irony of "I hate Facebook" post on Facebook.
1337biz 14y ago
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.
- mjn 14y ago
  While true, it seemed like a fairly pro-openness company, which not only said the right things but seemed to have a lot of employees genuinely committed to improving the state of academic literature. But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofit foundation, or at least a forkable open-source version of the platform, seem like necessary prerequisites if you want to ensure that Elsevier-and-co can't buy it out. I guess a company 100%-owned by a strong open-culture advocate could be reliable also, but it gets more complex when investors are in the mix. Also a reason I don't trust academia.edu compared to, say, the arXiv.
  - bioinformatics 14y ago
    The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.
    - res0nat0r 14y ago
      All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?
      - adimitrov 14y ago
        This week? No. One, two, or more years down the road? We shall see. I'm not 100% behind the Mendeley hate right now, but they're against all odds. While everything I've heard from the team so far, including on the prominent HN threads, has been reassuring and positive, it's still just words. People are making predictions about the future right now, and no words will be able to sway public opinion. Only action, and time. It seems Mendeley (or, as of now, Elsevier) are betting on the latter, because there has been no action, only PR.
Osmium 14y ago
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.
- wannesm 14y ago
  The Springer-Papers and Elsevier-Mendeley acquisitions are indeed interesting because they've happened at about the same time. It seems that the big publishers want to get a better grip on paper search and/or paper reading habits.
- treerex 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    What do you think can be done to improve it? Can you tell me what your ideal reference/citation software looks like?
Pitarou 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Honestly? It's a for-profit company, whose interests did you think was serving?
  - Pitarou 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
      - freyr 14y ago
        > yet, people are continually surprised and disappointed when a company takes a profitable course of action I think this is a fairly recent phenomenon, that's gone hand in hand with the development of the Internet. First, we had companies without business plans (or profits) that peaked in the 90s. That bubble burst, but the reputation of "something for nothing" has lingered. Companies have since found new ways to monetize users (e.g. targeted advertising) in a way that's mostly transparent to the users. This has perpetuated the sense of "something for nothing" associated with online products and services.
      - 14y ago
asdf333 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- mtraven 14y ago
  Mendeley was not a direct threat to Elsevier's business. They aren't a publisher. PLoS (and PLoS's model) is more of a direct threat. Fortunately they are a non-profit which I think makes them immune from takeover.
hack_edu 14y ago
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? ;)
- twog 14y ago
  I am working on something that may be of interest. Drop me a line, my email is in my profile
- pms 14y ago
  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?
  - tedsanders 14y ago
Jun8 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
      - SkyMarshal 14y ago
        You're new here so pro-tip: More concrete details, less snark, or you're gonna downvoted to oblivion. Instead of just telling someone they're wrong, explain why. How is Zotero not a browser-based application, and how does it do everything OP described?
rurounijones 14y ago
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)
denzil_correa 14y ago
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/ http://academia.edu/
cantankerous 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
youngerdryas 14y ago
"this is like Halliburton buying Greenpeace" Sounds about right.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  Yeah, Greenpeace is a VC funded for-profit company. Yeah, good analogy. :-)
Osiris 14y ago
We've come a long way when a "revolt" means "users post their frustrations on Twitter".
- Crake 14y ago
  A long way indeed, and mostly in a terrible direction. :/
parennoob 14y ago
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.
- treerex 14y ago
  Zotero is unlikely to go the way of Mendeley: may be worth checking out.
- pnathan 14y ago
  I've been looking at that and thinking about it lately. shoot me an email if you want to chat more (it's in my profile)
- johnminter 14y ago
  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.
profpjm 14y ago
revolt, takeover. reminds me of the mutiny post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525173
kriro 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Buying up a bunch of content? Gates already did that decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis There's no sign of freeing it, though.
Altenuvian 14y ago
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.
whyenot 14y ago
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
shared4you 14y ago
How to export, delete and move your Mendeley account: http://duncan.hull.name/2013/01/18/mendelete/ http://duncan.hull.name/2013/01/18/mendelete/
driverdan 14y ago
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.
jccalhoun 14y ago
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.
teyc 14y ago
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.

275 points by pms 14y ago

cs702 14y ago

Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-your-audience/ http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-y... -- 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.

roadnottaken 14y ago
It's called PLOS: http://www.plos.org/ http://www.plos.org/
onemorepassword 14y ago
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 14y ago
  > 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.
  - bmalee 14y ago
    There's a difference between a for-profit company with a government-backed monopoly, and a not-for-profit organisation with government support (of which there are already many examples). I don't think anyone here blames companies for putting up a paywall or doing something else to maximise their profits; it's why they exist. However, we do recognise that this is not always an ideal state of affairs. A public sector body is one way to remove the profit requirement; private-sector not-for-profit organisations are also a possibility (but have to worry more about where their funding comes from).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbooth 14y ago
    So you're arguing that because the government has a monopoly on force, anything bad that happens anywhere in the US is their fault because it's their guns backing up the law? Laws happen because a variety of agents (lobbyists, legislators, public interest groups) push for them. They're not enacted by some amorphous specter of 'government'.
  - rplacd 14y ago
    > The government is the entity which created the problem. And it acts as an extension of "the people" as the entity providing oversight and regulation in this example as well. That it doesn't happen in real life is evidence of subversion of an ideal, rather than some inherent truth.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology? The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is. Science is more expensive than software, though, and therein lies the rub.
  - Thrymr 14y ago
    Science is already funded, in very large part, by the federal government (in the US). The research is already subject to political pressures, here we're just talking about the (much smaller) amount that goes towards publications. Federal grants are going to fund research, the results of which are locked up behind the paywalls of proprietary journals (grant dollars even pay for the privilege of publishing in some journals). Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research.
    - omnisci 14y ago
      This is exactly what I'm working on. Also, publications by federally funded grants are required to be made public as well (for 1 year). However, even doing that, you are still stuck behind the political pressures, journal bias, and the peer review system which...for a lack of a better term, sucks. Science needs to be transparent and made available in real time. This is the whole purpose of science, to freely distribute knowledge for the well being of humanity. I honestly believe that and I'm working to bring that transparency to science as we speak.
    - simonster 14y ago
      > Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research. Yes, this needs to happen. NIH already requires that publications arising from NIH-funded research be made publicly available 12 months after publication (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). Other funding organizations really need to do this. IMHO, they should also require that publications be made publicly available immediately upon acceptance and provide incentives for "gold" open access (where the article is immediately made available on the publisher's website).
tomrod 14y ago
Know any donors? I'd love to be involved in a project like this. I wonder if the Wikimedia foundation would be interested--that would do a lot to get over the network effect advantages JSTOR and Elsevier already have. Additionally, I think that until academic publishing has a standard browser-based solution (MathML, MathJax + Pandoc + LaTeX) outside of PDF that the costs will be prohibitively expensive.
- simonster 14y ago
  JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.
  - tomrod 14y ago
    There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access. JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.
    - mjn 14y ago
      For the non-free content on JSTOR, I don't see much that another archive could do about it. The main issue is back issues of journals published between 1923 and now-ish. Future content could go open access directly online, in which case JSTOR doesn't even really enter into the picture. And JSTOR has already made all the older, public-domain content freely available. But in between, there is almost a century of copyrighted content controlled by the journals. JSTOR scans the paper journals, but can only make the PDFs available with agreement of the copyright holder. They could try to pressure them more, e.g. by threatening to evict journals from JSTOR if the journal doesn't agree to certain minimum licensing requirements. But they don't ultimately control that content themselves.
    - simonster 14y ago

ig1 14y ago

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

redblacktree 14y ago
Just like the irony of "I hate Facebook" post on Facebook.

1337biz 14y ago

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.

mjn 14y ago
While true, it seemed like a fairly pro-openness company, which not only said the right things but seemed to have a lot of employees genuinely committed to improving the state of academic literature. But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofit foundation, or at least a forkable open-source version of the platform, seem like necessary prerequisites if you want to ensure that Elsevier-and-co can't buy it out. I guess a company 100%-owned by a strong open-culture advocate could be reliable also, but it gets more complex when investors are in the mix. Also a reason I don't trust academia.edu compared to, say, the arXiv.
- bioinformatics 14y ago
  The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.
  - res0nat0r 14y ago
    All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?
    - adimitrov 14y ago
      This week? No. One, two, or more years down the road? We shall see. I'm not 100% behind the Mendeley hate right now, but they're against all odds. While everything I've heard from the team so far, including on the prominent HN threads, has been reassuring and positive, it's still just words. People are making predictions about the future right now, and no words will be able to sway public opinion. Only action, and time. It seems Mendeley (or, as of now, Elsevier) are betting on the latter, because there has been no action, only PR.

Osmium 14y ago

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.

wannesm 14y ago
The Springer-Papers and Elsevier-Mendeley acquisitions are indeed interesting because they've happened at about the same time. It seems that the big publishers want to get a better grip on paper search and/or paper reading habits.
treerex 14y ago
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 14y ago
  What do you think can be done to improve it? Can you tell me what your ideal reference/citation software looks like?

Pitarou 14y ago

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 14y ago
Honestly? It's a for-profit company, whose interests did you think was serving?
- Pitarou 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
    - freyr 14y ago
      > yet, people are continually surprised and disappointed when a company takes a profitable course of action I think this is a fairly recent phenomenon, that's gone hand in hand with the development of the Internet. First, we had companies without business plans (or profits) that peaked in the 90s. That bubble burst, but the reputation of "something for nothing" has lingered. Companies have since found new ways to monetize users (e.g. targeted advertising) in a way that's mostly transparent to the users. This has perpetuated the sense of "something for nothing" associated with online products and services.
    - 14y ago

asdf333 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
mtraven 14y ago
Mendeley was not a direct threat to Elsevier's business. They aren't a publisher. PLoS (and PLoS's model) is more of a direct threat. Fortunately they are a non-profit which I think makes them immune from takeover.

hack_edu 14y ago

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? ;)

twog 14y ago
I am working on something that may be of interest. Drop me a line, my email is in my profile
pms 14y ago
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?
- tedsanders 14y ago

Jun8 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
    - SkyMarshal 14y ago
      You're new here so pro-tip: More concrete details, less snark, or you're gonna downvoted to oblivion. Instead of just telling someone they're wrong, explain why. How is Zotero not a browser-based application, and how does it do everything OP described?

rurounijones 14y ago

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)

denzil_correa 14y ago

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/ http://academia.edu/

cantankerous 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

youngerdryas 14y ago

"this is like Halliburton buying Greenpeace" Sounds about right.

rsvidal 14y ago
Yeah, Greenpeace is a VC funded for-profit company. Yeah, good analogy. :-)

Osiris 14y ago

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

Crake 14y ago
A long way indeed, and mostly in a terrible direction. :/

parennoob 14y ago

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.

treerex 14y ago
Zotero is unlikely to go the way of Mendeley: may be worth checking out.
pnathan 14y ago
I've been looking at that and thinking about it lately. shoot me an email if you want to chat more (it's in my profile)
johnminter 14y ago
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.

profpjm 14y ago

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

kriro 14y ago

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 14y ago
Buying up a bunch of content? Gates already did that decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbis There's no sign of freeing it, though.

Altenuvian 14y ago

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.

whyenot 14y ago

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

shared4you 14y ago

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

driverdan 14y ago

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.

jccalhoun 14y ago

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.

teyc 14y ago

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.