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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."
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.
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).