The literature that people read is widely scattered across different outlets. Big publishers are facing a revolt over the cost of institutional subscriptions, and journals are increasingly irrelevant as aggregations. Here are some possibilities.įorget the "Last.fm" of papers, what about the "iTunes of papers"?. Let's assume that Elsevier does, indeed, buy Mendeley, and wants to do interesting things with Mendeley, and that Mendeley doesn't become one of the many startups that have a successful "exit" for the founders but ends up dying in the bosom of a larger company. They helped foster the altmetrics movement, and have a great presence on Twitter and at conferences (i.e., you can talk to actual people who write code).
The way Mendeley engineered the creation of a bibliographic database in the cloud is genius, as is their recognition that the object around which scientists will cluster is the article, not the author. The algorithms Mendeley use to de-duplicate their catalogue are flawed, occasionally creating entirely fictional entries. The Desktop client communicates with Mendeley's database using a different protocol, hence the API lacks the functionality needed to make truly great apps on the platform. The API sucks, mostly because Mendeley themselves don't actually use it. Mendeley is suffering some from serious failings, most of which could be addressed with sufficient resources. They fund challenges, are investing heavily in interactive and semantic markup of papers (for example, interactive phylogenies), and have built an app ecosystem on their publishing platform. So, given that I'm suitably compromised, here are some thoughts.Įlsevier are big, ugly, and at the corporate level are doing things that actively make researchers angry (see The Cost of Knowledge).Įlsevier are one of the most innovative science publishers around.
#MENDELEY DESKTOP CRASHES ON OPENING MAC PDF#
I've published in Elsevier journals (most recently a couple of papers that, thanks to the efforts of Paul Craze, editor of TREE, are "free" in the sense you can download the PDF for free), and I took part in the Elsevier Grand Challenge.
I'm not paying customer (but I do pay for some Internet services such as DropBox, BackBlaze, and Spotify, so it's not that I won't pay, it's just that the service Mendeley charge for doesn't interest me).
Disclosure: I use Mendeley to manage 100,000's of references, and use the API for various projects. Here's some probably worthless speculation to add to the mix. Oh FFS, nooooooo! MT phylogenomics: Elsevier In Advanced Talks To Buy Mendeley For Around $100M /7/els… via techcrunch- Siouxsie Wiles January 17, srp dancohen I imagine a coin flip deep within the Elsevier Headquarters Cave, using a gold, custom-minted BUY OR SUE coin.- Jason Priem January 17, 2013īy the way, over here Zotero headquarters chnm) we welcome all Mendeley users to a truly open platform for research - Dan Cohen January 17, 2013 The rumour that Elsevier is buying Mendeley has been greeted with a mixture of horror, anger, peppered with a few congratulations, I told you so's, and touting for new customers: tcrn.ch/W8L5io by ingridlunden- TechCrunch January 17, 2013 Elsevier In Advanced Talks To Buy Mendeley For Around $100M To Beef Up In Social, Open Source Educ.
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