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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.
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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
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.
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.
I switched from Zotero to Bibtex for my academic work a few months ago. I used Zotero for years and was generally happy with it, but I have really started to enjoy working in latex and bibtex is the obvious choice for that. There is just something really nice about having a plain text document. It can be easily versioned, edited on pretty much any device (including vim from a chromebook I travel with), and being able to manually edit the library file has shown me several errors Zotero made importing sources that I failed to notice before.
Gummi, an F/OSS latex editor, has nice latex/bibtex integration so you can insert references by searching/clicking rather than having to know their identifier.
Google scholar has a nice "import to bibtex" function so adding a source to your library is as simple as copy/paste. I do wish I could find (or make time to write) a simple chrome extension that appends a .bib file automatically to the selected library, but otherwise I couldn't he happier with it.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
... except, of course, that Elsevier has apparently been publishing some of those fake academic journals themselves. See, for example, this comment.