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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?
Nope... If it's illegal in your country, that your click is illegal.
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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.
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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.
Absolutely yes. It wasn't forbidden for Aaron Schwartz to download articles from JSTOR (he had the credentials). It was a violation of the ToS to use automated means to robo-download thousands of them. And it was a violation of the IT policies to bring his own equipment there and wire it up to the campus network and hiding its existance.
... except, of course, that Elsevier has apparently been publishing some of those fake academic journals themselves. See, for example, this comment.