Slashdot Mirror
How Publishing Upstart Mendeley Weathered Revolt and Became Part of the Paywall
Lashdots writes At Fast Company, Tina Amritha writes about the controversial rise of reference manager startup Mendeley, which inspired revolt among its users when it announced in 2013 it was being acquired by scholarly publishing conglomerate Elsevier. "Seeing that some of our most vocal advocates thought we had sold them out felt awful," CEO Victor Henning said recently over a tea in Amsterdam, where Elsevier, Mendeley's parent company, is headquartered. "I had steeled myself for some pretty violent reactions beforehand. After all, I was aware of Elsevier's reputation and the mistakes they had made."...
Elsevier, like other large publishers, loathed Mendeley's open model; In 2013, it had forced Mendeley to remove its titles from its database. The thinking behind its acquisition of Mendeley—for a sum rumored to between $69 million and $100 million—was simple: to squash the threat Mendeley posed to its traditional subscription model, and to own the ecosystem that Mendeley had constructed, with its valuable data on the behavior of millions of researchers. But Henning contends, "We've kept the promises we made when we began."
Elsevier, like other large publishers, loathed Mendeley's open model; In 2013, it had forced Mendeley to remove its titles from its database. The thinking behind its acquisition of Mendeley—for a sum rumored to between $69 million and $100 million—was simple: to squash the threat Mendeley posed to its traditional subscription model, and to own the ecosystem that Mendeley had constructed, with its valuable data on the behavior of millions of researchers. But Henning contends, "We've kept the promises we made when we began."
Just Revolting !!
A sellout is a sellout... period. Just admit that you saw the large cash out and couldn't walk away. We understand, you're human after all. Most of us couldn't walk away from $68-100 million. But, don't try to blow smoke up people's asses that you kept to your original mission. If you can't sleep at night because you sold out people who were counting on you, that's your problem.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Nothing else to say. I'd be a sell out too. Stop playing the humble card
...but $69-100 million goes a long way to ease the pain.
As much as I would love to hate the guy for selling out, I realize everyone has a price. 7-8 figures is a lot of money. Can anyone here honestly say they wouldn't take it?
Why do we give attention or care to some sellout? They sold out, they go take their millions and be forgotten. You let go what you created that was good. Get lost, you are no longer worth my time.
Take your $$ and run - long and far! You sold out your principles for 30 pieces of silver. Deal with it!
Then why is it still filled with bugs and a lack of features? Is it purposely not being fixed? It has a host of problems like printing and sidebar metadata windows being buggy.
We heard about the sell-out
Product is more convenient http://dinhvigps.vn/
Researchers don't get paid when they submit a document to a peer-reviewed journal, they don't see a dime in royalties from the copyright licenses that the publishers sell, and they even usually have to submit a fee with any paper they send for publication (to cover the costs of peer review). This means that the publishers unfairly benefit from:
1) The grant-makers who fund the research;
2) the labor of the researchers/authors.
That the publishers are trying to claim that they have exclusive rights to the distribution and licensing -- and more importantly, that they're attempting to create a reef of minimum resources/energy required to gain access to research -- is ludicrous. Why aren't they sharing the $1.1 billion in profits they earned on the backs of the people who submit to their journals with the people who actually provide the content that the publishers paywall off? (Grant-makers should probably also benefit from this, in any profit-sharing situation.)
And more importantly, why are the publishers trying to impose a "minimum resources required to participate" bar on STEM? If the strategy is supposed to be to get underprivileged students into STEM, it's definitely not going to happen as long as the students are working from 10+ year old science regurgitated into textbooks.
I mean, at least with open-source software, a commercial venture that builds and supports a product based on any given open-source code cannot prevent other people (or the original authors themselves) from also sharing the code. That's the true meaning of open science: that the original author can benefit from the peer review they already submitted a fee to cover the cost of, and make the paper available themselves without assigning copyright to an organization that will profit from the authors' (much harder) work.
If the publishing industry actually had to pay what the material was worth, rather than shifting all the costs to the creators while profiting from what is essentially a basic administrative (arranging peer review, administering contracts) and mechanical (printing copies, running servers to make copies) practice, there would be no $1.1 billion in profit in a year.
They kept their eye on the shareholders' profitability ball in a very difficult environment full of bullying.
I think it's a good story of tenacity and success. I congratulate the Mendeley management team.
Scientific paywalls (preventing access to science that was funded entirely or partially by the public purse) are a crime.
We need every available quality mind, rich or poor, on some of our scientific and engineering challenges today.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I may have a price, but i have yet to see a dollar amount that matches what im worth.
Either you're one of those entitled millennials, or you listen to your mom way too much. Good luck to people around you.
lucm, indeed.
Every one is collecting and selling your information. In many US states they collect information about drivers and sell it to companies even though privacy is violated. Banks do the same. So, thieves teal and sell to foreign governments. As long as political corruption is pervasive democracy or communism has the same effect. But you are nothing before big money and their buying power of bogus politicians. Live with it and. That is your destiny. No government is by the people , for the people and of the people, rather buy the people, far away from the people and if necessary Off the people.
You are right about getting paid for providing a service. Except that when it comes to scientific publishing, at least in computer science and maths, authors, reviewers and editors provide free service and content to a company that will then sell it back at an incredibly high price to that very community.
On the other hand, I don't get why people revolt against Elsevier and not for instance Springer, who publishes the large majority of proceedings in CS following the same model. Or all other publishers for that matter.
I also don't get why so many researchers complain about the power THEY give to those publishers by not making their work freely available on the arxiv or their homepage or researchgate or ... The number of alternatives is overwhelming, yet relatively few seem to care.
I'm sad to see traditional publishers who pay for reporters and columnists be undermined by aggregators that leach content and don't do much
And the award for most ignorant post in the thread goes to......
Elsevier IS an aggregator that leaches content and doesn't do much--they don't produce ANYTHING. They've "acquired" copy rights on other people's research data by paying researchers NOTHING except the "prestige" of peer review (which they also don't do or pay for--they get the same researchers to do it for them for free.
They are the epitome of a leech. And the research community HATES them, but can't avoid them for a variety of institutional reasons (see also: publish or perish).
First, the situation is more complicated outside of math/physics/cs. E.g. in biology, getting papers is much more complicated, which has connections to computer literacy of authors, conventions in the field, and maybe also conditions of the journals.
Second, if you are an institutional researcher, there are good chances that your institution has subscription to the major places relevant for your research.
I hope it's a problem solved over time largely by natural selection. I'm much less likely to cite papers that I can't read easily.
AFAIK Elsevier's pricing structure and conditions on things like arxiv uploads is much stricter than Springer's. Not sure though.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
It's ok, Zotero and ResearchGate together fill the void from the loss of Mendelay.
Elsevier in particular is hated because of some very shady business practices. They were caught setting up journals for (drug?) corporations to publish what effectively amounted to uncritical advertising for their products.
Repeat after me: information should be free. Not free to buy, not free to sell, just free. Free for all to use as they like. Free to use as their time permits. Free from coercion. Just free.
If that steps on money grubbing publishers toes who think they can take some of that and extract their percentage of profit, too bad. Maybe they should get a real job.
The fruits of research belongs to everyone on earth. Some smart guy or girl spent a lot of time reading, thinking, experimenting, writing up an idea. The fruits of all that work should not be locked up behind a paywall. It should be accessible instantly from anywhere forever, so that humanity can progress.
You're way off base with your defense of publishers.
Personally I have found Mendeley frustrating to use anyway. Seemed more interested in shiny features than working well. Wasn't very good at maintaining its bibtex file (which could be a problem using it with other programs) and expected you to have digital references only.
JabRef is a great multiplatform reference manager which combines excellently with Docear for writing a paper/thesis/dissertation (Docear lets you organize your references and annotations as part of your outline). I have also found it worth it to run PDF-XChange Viewer under WINE. It is unfortunately not open source but it supports any feature you can think of for annotating PDFs and integrates nicely (with a bit of non-windows setup) with Docear.
Zotero is another great reference manager. I have also heard good things about BibDesk (OS X only).
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
http://i.imgur.com/ZSArwvY.png
Am I the only one having problems parsing that headline?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is putting research papers on a website such a big expense that a paywall is required? Hosting scientific papers is an area in which the open source cultists could become public heroes.
try to imagine the internet without any reliable search engines and no paywalls. In this model all the information is free and out there and is either completely unusable or impossible to locate and no chance of a concensus on what information is the highest value.
If there is no added value why do people pay then? They could put their work up on Xarchiv or just post it on their own web site or submit it to many other journals. When it comes to other journals the model is either author pays or reader pays. Elsevier is reader pays. so called open content journals are author pays. There's even hybrid journals where if the author doesn't pay the reader must. For most journals there usually is also a page charge to the author no matter what.
Yet this people willingly submit their work to journals of both stripes.
The cost is what prevents a tragedy of the commons. Journals who have good names are desirable to be published in and also desirable to peer review for. This becomes a virtuous circle and tends in the long run to promote the best work worth my time to read. That's what I want. there's too much to read. I want some filter on the process. Some level of curation.
When publishing houses can enforce that with either model then cost of that is negligible compared to the resulting value.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Then that smart guy or gal should just publish it themselves and put it on a web server themselves. A publisher does some actual work. They publish things for people.
Why is putting research papers on a website such a big expense that a paywall is required? Hosting scientific papers is an area in which the open source cultists could become public heroes.
Didn't Aaron Swartz end up dead for accessing too many articles? Notably Johns Hopkins University mentions Aaron Swartz only briefly in their data science specialisation but only by name not anything he contributed.
why is this marked "troll"?
It wasn't hard to find. I knew scientists could figure this out.
Thanks for the laugh anon.
And yet, to publish in a, not necessarily equally ranked, open access journal can cost up to ten times as much in publishing fees.