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Mendeley Acquired By Elsevier
First time accepted submitter alexgieg writes "Academic reference manager Mendeley has announced they're joining Elsevier. They say this won't change anything for Mendeley users and that they're still committed to their Open API efforts, all the while acknowledging that Elsevier's reputation hasn't been the best as of late. If you're currently a Mendeley user will you continue using it from now on? Or will this move prompt you to start evaluating alternatives such as the Open Source, Firefox-based Zotero?"
Mendeley Industries - An Import/Export Company & Purveyor Of Fine Latex Products.
Oh wait, wrong company.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Elsevier are greedy bastards whose existence has a huge negative effect on science and academia.
Personally, I'm sticking with Citavi. It reads all common citation export formats, supports a common library for several people, and works flawlessly :)
using Zotero in the USE is probably a federal crime, bearing a liability up to several decades in prison: as they say "Zotero [allows] you to add [content] to your personal library with a single click. [...] a journal article from JSTOR, a news story from the New York Times [...]"
Are we sure that semi-automatically adding an article from JSTOR or NYT to my library is not a violation of their terms of service?
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
This announcement is the best way to prevent me from using Mendeley. I will not touch anything that's handled by Elsevier, just as I refuse to review anything that comes from them.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Mendeley was -- and is -- excellent. It's a truly platform independent, sensible, reference manager, arguably only beaten by the closed-source (and pricey) Papers for OS X. I'm really annoyed to hear this; I don't trust Elsevier not to run it into the ground and try and 'monetize' it. At the moment they've got a very effective 'freemium' model going on, one that actually makes sense where you essentially pay more for hosting. It's really convenient having all your papers & citations stored in the cloud.
Zotero, unfortunately for me at least, is something of a joke; amongst other things, I don't use firefox, I don't even consistently use the same computer(s) at the different departments I work, and I've never quite got it to copy and paste citation keys that don't change from version to version...
While we're here, I've also had a look at colwiz, which seems quite good if a bit overkill, and used Papers exenstively in the past. Alas, there isn't really a FOSS alternative to all of those, at least, not one that I've been able to find...
Being a Linux user in the Biomedical field has its issues sometimes, especially with collaborative writing where most colleagues simply out of ignorance work with MS office and Endnote. The combination LibreOffice and Zotero (stand-alone version) has proven the best fit for me to do my work. One disadvantage can be that I need to send my documents with final formatting rather than with the citation tags in the document to ensure that stuff works on the computers of my colleagues.
I currently subscribe to Mendeley. They have been slowly but surely improving the quality of their software the last three years I have been using it, and I couldn't live without it. There are a few things I would like they've just never bothered to implement, even though many people have requested them, but then again at least they have a good forum and request system. I like to have my library of references synced with me wherever I go, so when I open a word document on any of my computers all the referencing works correctly.
Maybe this will mean they have more support and be able to do things like spend the time on their mobile versions so they actually work. But really I think this is the beginning of the end. Elsevier just doesn't seem to have any incentive to keep Mendeley easy to use with any publisher and have all the sharing capabilities it currently does. What if they don't like the fact I can import any open source format referencing styles for any journals? Maybe they will just make it awfully expensive to keep the current functionality, the price has been going up anyway on storage space. I deal with hundreds of papers in PDF, and Mendeley has the best solution for making notes, highlighting content and organizing PDFs with it's inbuilt viewer which makes it easy to keep up with my research. Zotero lacks these tools I'm not sure what the alternatives would be should Elsevier wreck Mendeley somehow.
I considered a couple of years ago moving to Mendeley from Zotero, they had a nice PDF annotation feature for research teams on the desktop software, this was pretty cool before the age of annotating articles on tablets. My prime reason for not moving was that Mendeley's monetarization logic was not clear. Along with it not being open source, it was easy to stay with Zotero: made by a not-for-profit institution, and open source. Now I'm really glad I stuck with Zotero!
Zotero + Zotfile + a tablet is all I need.
I guess it always pays off to be always suspicious of shiny new applications, when it is not immediately clear why is it free (as in beer)? I argue that this is even more important than whether it is open source or not. This, of course, means that 90% of web apps should not be used for mission-critical stuff.
End of childish debate.
By the way, Elsevier certainly have their share of bad sides to say the least, but they have recently made a lot of their publications that are at least four years old freely available.
What say you, SIAM, IEEE, Wiley, Springer, ...?
What alternatives do people recommend? I tried zotero, admittedly this was quite a while ago, but it was so unbelievably awful that I vowed not to go back. I also don't really like being tied into firefox extensions...
"Have you seen that new Kia Zotero?"
"Yeah, what a shitbox!"
... and use BibTeX! There are good front-ends like JabRef if you don't like editing test files.
I now know which one I won't be trying.
I'm on Academia, though. A bit silly, given my lack of peer-reviewed publications...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Converting everything today. The content mafia is a racket.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Well, that simplifies things.
[crosses Mendeley off list]
http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/questions/699525-how-to-close-an-account
This is quite interesting seeing that my citing app of choice Papers was recently taken over by Springer another big research publisher. I wonder if all these big publishers are wanting to take over the low cost and mass marker reference/citation managers, especially as some of them have social features. Nothing beats having loyal customers who you can data mine nowadays - even Google is in the game with Google Scholar. The older style reference managers are fairly expensive, and by having a low end product which is free, I think Elsevier will go someway to restore some of their reputation, especially as their ScienceDirect resource is actually quite good.
... note this interesting /. article: http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/04/08/2325234/fake-academic-journals-are-a-very-real-problem
So really, you need big-publishing if only to keep it all real.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
LaTeX hits your criteria numbers 2, 3, and 4. There's no auto-copy-paste for a mixed text+citation, however you can copy a citation into the bibliography portion of your latex document file and have bibtex handle details for you. Multiple passes of LaTeX automatically take care of the format details for various types of print (article vs. conference proceeding vs. report vs. book chapter), re-ordering and renumbering reference and citation numbers (and chapter numbers and figure numbers and equation numbers, and their corresponding in-line references to these items). And of course the numbers stay in order of their use in LaTeX also, I believe. It's just cloud storage that's a problem, and the widespread availability of the right file formats on websites.
.
No, wait, I'm wrong about that. Math journals and physics journals do make bibtex format versions of citations available on their web-sites. Other journals may also do that.
Papers was picked up by Springer and now Mendelay is becoming part of Elsevier. This may have a silver lining for zotero. Papers, Mendeley and Zotero use CSL for formatting the references in the text. This means that the publishers now will have a very strong incentive to provides the CSL files for their publication, as they have done all along with the EndNote styles. Of course they can just be redirect their users to Zotero for styles or lock the export of CSL files to their preferred reference manager, but in the first case they will hear constant wining from their users and the second case requires quite a bit of work on their side.
If I win a multi-million dollar lottery jackpot I would willingly host every research paper for FREE submitted by the original authors. I an sick and tired of publicly funded research, usually undertaken a universities and colleges, being locked behind a pay wall. The "payment" to research paper authors should be limited to the citation of their work instead of money; they already earned a pay cheque while conducting the research in 99.9% of the cases. Any privately funded research conducted by publicly funded universities and colleges should be freely available as well. Real scientists want to increase the body of knowledge in their field, but today we have robber barons seeking rents and tithes.
I've switched from mendeley to Qiqqa and I don't regret it ! www.qiqqa.com !