Midas wrote: ↑Fri Jun 01, 2018 1:04 pm
Precisely the reason why I stopped keeping tabs with
Mendeley: it showed a lot of promise while it was being independently developed -- but then it devolved into just another corporate tool for locked in content after being acquired.
Yeah it could have been something really awesome.
I did a bit more digging since I posted about this the other day and wanted to note why getting bought by this corporation in particular was so poisonous. Basically everything everyone is unhappy with Facebook about in terms of gobbling up data is happening with Elsevier. According to people I'm talking to in the industry, Mendeley reads your research while you're doing it and then uses that information to dictate activities in their publishing arm. It's not just harming privacy, it could harm your ability to survive in academia and publish often thankless research work.
Sadly, the link I really wanted to share is ironically behind a paywall:
Elsevier Is Becoming a Data Company. Should Universities Be Wary?. Meanwhile the company is making a killing (
Elsevier’s profits swell to more than £900 million) and privacy and open-research-aware universities in Europe are pushing back: Europe’s open-access drive escalates as
university stand-offs spread.
In short, they're bad for research, for
intellectual property, and ultimately for science as a whole.
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EDIT: Two more related links:
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"Confirming earlier speculation, Elsevier has acquired the reference management site Mendeley. Terms were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has estimated the deal to be worth between $69 million and $100 million in total. That’s approximately $30-45 per user. Given revenues that seem to be relatively slight at this point, Elsevier appears to have paid a significant multiple for Mendeley." April, 2013 -
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/201 ... -elsevier/
EDIT2:
