6 ms·

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

by 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.
      - bioinformatics 14y ago
        The same PR team that is flooding social media with the usual spiel will be given maybe a 6-month 1-year contract and will be gone soon.
    - yarrel 14y ago
      No, they turned into useful idiots.
    - slightperturb 14y ago
      No, but with gradual attrition due to fundamental disagreements with the new management, I imagine the character of the company will change significantly within the year, if not sooner.
    - Thrymr 14y ago
      No, they're leaving: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-on-mendeley-elsevier-why-i-left-to-start http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o... Choice quote: "For that reason then I co-founded PeerJ, an Open Access journal, with one aim of never being in the position to take shit ever again from a closed publisher."
      - rsvidal 14y ago
        They are not leaving. This one person left, a while ago. Correlation or causation, I can't speak for him.
        bioinformatics 14y ago
        Maye this person that left knew something like this would happen. The timing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the ones thst stay are linked to a publisher that has no morals, no ethics.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - PeterisP 14y ago
      All these employees, including the CEO, are no longer in control anymore; the owner, Elsevier, is in control and is not an impartial 'financial investor' but an 'strategic investor' with a larger stake in the industry than the whole of Mendeley. It means that a week ago CEO could make the same promises and be heard seriously, but the same CEO promises right now are not worth the paper they're not written on. Now at any point in the future all the Mendeley 'openness' promises can be easily broken by Elsevier, so they either know that all the promises they're making now are empty (i.e., lying intentionally) or they don't know that (then they're naive and incompetent as general managers). Promises can be made by those in control. Leaders in public companies can be considered in control. Leaders in privately held companies can be considered in control if their public vision and roadmap is aligned with the owner. But if the owner has a clear interest to change the roadmap - then it would be imprudent to rely on such a roadmap. Elsevier has a reputation of intentionally sabotaging projects (say, gov't initiatives) that should bring openness - if they fool you twice, shame on you.
    - bioinformatics 14y ago
      No, they just became employees of a corporation that use unethical tactics in publishing. You end up guilty by association.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    PR is irrelevant to "open". Either the product is or isn't. Academics should be smart enough is it isn't.
    - bioinformatics 14y ago
      Academics usually like shiny things, specially free. And Mendeley didn't target the old school ones, they targeted students, post-docs, usually the trend-setters in the academic environment. Professors and Senior Researchers are too busy or don't have time to check these things, and they end up using what other people use in their labs. And for broke, internet saavy students, free stuff with a promise of a new groundbreaking trend in science was enough to lure them.
  - MrGunn 14y ago
    Your assumption is that now Mendeley is going to suddenly shed it's sheep's clothing and reveal itself to be a wolf. As a Mendeley employee (and a scientist, not a PR person), you may not believe me or you may think I'm just naive but I think you will have to wait and see. Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Still wondering how academia.edu got approved for an edu domain name. Screams scam to me.
  - mjn 14y ago
    In the early days there wasn't a formal process for .edu approval. There was a bit of netiquette that educational institutions should register under .edu, nonprofits under .org, network providers under .net, and companies under .com. That started being enforced for .edu in 2001, but previous registrants were grandfathered in. The registrar did manage to evict a bunch of the questionable .edus in 2003, by stepping up enforcement of technical requirements, such as the requirement to have accurate whois information, and to be responsive via the whois-registered email address. But presumably academia.edu survived that purge. I can't actually think of any other prominent for-profit company that still retains an .edu. The registrar also now prohibits transferring them, so you can't buy one even if some others have survived (though maybe you could lease it).
glesica 14y ago
I have personally integrated Mendeley into my process as a student, despite the fact that I should have known better. Sometimes everyone gets distracted by shiny things, I guess. Shame on me.
- rsvidal 14y ago
  Mendeley is not going to stop working all of a sudden. It's still the same tool, developed by the same people, with the same roadmap and vision ahead.
  - PeterisP 14y ago
    Their vision right now has a remote control with a "reverse" button, held by well known enemies of that vision.
    - rsvidal 14y ago
      "We are committing to implementing Mendeley’s existing product development roadmap, and giving the company the space to “let Mendeley be Mendeley.”" - http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/ http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/
      - PeterisP 14y ago
        I'd be rich if I had a penny for each time such promises were publicly made when acquiring a company and broken within less than 12 months. Even right here on HN there have been many posts about such situations some time after acquisitions; and Elsvier reasonably does have practical motivation to interfere here and there. Such arms-length separations are often published in mergers&acquisitions PR and practically never happen in practice, they all get abused - should we really believe that Elsevier is so exceptionally more etchical than most other companies? They have that "remote" in their hands. They have promised not to use it. Will they?
      - freshhawk 14y ago
        And from a company with such a reputation of truthful public statements!
hemmer 14y ago
I really like the way Mendeley handles notes, specifically highlighting / annotating PDFs. Do you know of any alternatives that include this? I was planning on writing my own at some point but it might be a bit ambitious.
- snowwindwaves 14y ago
  check out quicka (spelled qiqqa) http://www.qiqqa.com http://www.qiqqa.com I chose it a few months ago over mendeley because it allowed me to search in the PDF annotations, which isn't possible with mendeley. I recall mendeley could search notes added to a PDF file (one text area for the whole file), but not within sticky notes attached to specific pages, so it was impossible to search the annotations I made and also have those annotations appear on the relevant part of the PDF. The other thing I like about qiqqa is that it allows us to have a shared library on our local server, instead of having to send all our data to the cloud. Both are great desktop tools for full text search across many PDF files, even those that need OCR. Before I was using google desktop for this function, and qiqqa is definitely a step up.
  - hemmer 14y ago
    This looks great, however Windows only is a bit of a deal breaker. Definitely going to keep my eye on it though.
- drewfrank 14y ago
  Keep an eye on http://hypothes.is http://hypothes.is. I think they plan to support private annotations, and handle PDFs through pdf.js. It doesn't have an offline document management component, but it could be used as the annotation component in a larger system.
- jessriedel 14y ago
  I spent some time a few months back researching ways to have electronic PDFs which I could annotate and keep on my tablet. Mendeley was far and away the best. Here's hoping someone else figures this out.
- 14y ago

by 1337biz 14y ago

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.
    - bioinformatics 14y ago
      The same PR team that is flooding social media with the usual spiel will be given maybe a 6-month 1-year contract and will be gone soon.
  - yarrel 14y ago
    No, they turned into useful idiots.
  - slightperturb 14y ago
    No, but with gradual attrition due to fundamental disagreements with the new management, I imagine the character of the company will change significantly within the year, if not sooner.
  - Thrymr 14y ago
    No, they're leaving: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-on-mendeley-elsevier-why-i-left-to-start http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o... Choice quote: "For that reason then I co-founded PeerJ, an Open Access journal, with one aim of never being in the position to take shit ever again from a closed publisher."
    - rsvidal 14y ago
      They are not leaving. This one person left, a while ago. Correlation or causation, I can't speak for him.
      - bioinformatics 14y ago
        Maye this person that left knew something like this would happen. The timing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the ones thst stay are linked to a publisher that has no morals, no ethics.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - PeterisP 14y ago
    All these employees, including the CEO, are no longer in control anymore; the owner, Elsevier, is in control and is not an impartial 'financial investor' but an 'strategic investor' with a larger stake in the industry than the whole of Mendeley. It means that a week ago CEO could make the same promises and be heard seriously, but the same CEO promises right now are not worth the paper they're not written on. Now at any point in the future all the Mendeley 'openness' promises can be easily broken by Elsevier, so they either know that all the promises they're making now are empty (i.e., lying intentionally) or they don't know that (then they're naive and incompetent as general managers). Promises can be made by those in control. Leaders in public companies can be considered in control. Leaders in privately held companies can be considered in control if their public vision and roadmap is aligned with the owner. But if the owner has a clear interest to change the roadmap - then it would be imprudent to rely on such a roadmap. Elsevier has a reputation of intentionally sabotaging projects (say, gov't initiatives) that should bring openness - if they fool you twice, shame on you.
  - bioinformatics 14y ago
    No, they just became employees of a corporation that use unethical tactics in publishing. You end up guilty by association.
- Evbn 14y ago
  PR is irrelevant to "open". Either the product is or isn't. Academics should be smart enough is it isn't.
  - bioinformatics 14y ago
    Academics usually like shiny things, specially free. And Mendeley didn't target the old school ones, they targeted students, post-docs, usually the trend-setters in the academic environment. Professors and Senior Researchers are too busy or don't have time to check these things, and they end up using what other people use in their labs. And for broke, internet saavy students, free stuff with a promise of a new groundbreaking trend in science was enough to lure them.
- MrGunn 14y ago
  Your assumption is that now Mendeley is going to suddenly shed it's sheep's clothing and reveal itself to be a wolf. As a Mendeley employee (and a scientist, not a PR person), you may not believe me or you may think I'm just naive but I think you will have to wait and see. Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.
Evbn 14y ago
Still wondering how academia.edu got approved for an edu domain name. Screams scam to me.
- mjn 14y ago
  In the early days there wasn't a formal process for .edu approval. There was a bit of netiquette that educational institutions should register under .edu, nonprofits under .org, network providers under .net, and companies under .com. That started being enforced for .edu in 2001, but previous registrants were grandfathered in. The registrar did manage to evict a bunch of the questionable .edus in 2003, by stepping up enforcement of technical requirements, such as the requirement to have accurate whois information, and to be responsive via the whois-registered email address. But presumably academia.edu survived that purge. I can't actually think of any other prominent for-profit company that still retains an .edu. The registrar also now prohibits transferring them, so you can't buy one even if some others have survived (though maybe you could lease it).

glesica 14y ago

I have personally integrated Mendeley into my process as a student, despite the fact that I should have known better. Sometimes everyone gets distracted by shiny things, I guess. Shame on me.

rsvidal 14y ago
Mendeley is not going to stop working all of a sudden. It's still the same tool, developed by the same people, with the same roadmap and vision ahead.
- PeterisP 14y ago
  Their vision right now has a remote control with a "reverse" button, held by well known enemies of that vision.
  - rsvidal 14y ago
    "We are committing to implementing Mendeley’s existing product development roadmap, and giving the company the space to “let Mendeley be Mendeley.”" - http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/ http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/
    - PeterisP 14y ago
      I'd be rich if I had a penny for each time such promises were publicly made when acquiring a company and broken within less than 12 months. Even right here on HN there have been many posts about such situations some time after acquisitions; and Elsvier reasonably does have practical motivation to interfere here and there. Such arms-length separations are often published in mergers&acquisitions PR and practically never happen in practice, they all get abused - should we really believe that Elsevier is so exceptionally more etchical than most other companies? They have that "remote" in their hands. They have promised not to use it. Will they?
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      And from a company with such a reputation of truthful public statements!

hemmer 14y ago

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

snowwindwaves 14y ago
check out quicka (spelled qiqqa) http://www.qiqqa.com http://www.qiqqa.com I chose it a few months ago over mendeley because it allowed me to search in the PDF annotations, which isn't possible with mendeley. I recall mendeley could search notes added to a PDF file (one text area for the whole file), but not within sticky notes attached to specific pages, so it was impossible to search the annotations I made and also have those annotations appear on the relevant part of the PDF. The other thing I like about qiqqa is that it allows us to have a shared library on our local server, instead of having to send all our data to the cloud. Both are great desktop tools for full text search across many PDF files, even those that need OCR. Before I was using google desktop for this function, and qiqqa is definitely a step up.
- hemmer 14y ago
  This looks great, however Windows only is a bit of a deal breaker. Definitely going to keep my eye on it though.
drewfrank 14y ago
Keep an eye on http://hypothes.is http://hypothes.is. I think they plan to support private annotations, and handle PDFs through pdf.js. It doesn't have an offline document management component, but it could be used as the annotation component in a larger system.
jessriedel 14y ago
I spent some time a few months back researching ways to have electronic PDFs which I could annotate and keep on my tablet. Mendeley was far and away the best. Here's hoping someone else figures this out.
14y ago