Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-y... -- one slide shown in the background, in particular, makes me cringe and laugh at the same time: "Only sell your users to whoever has the deepest pockets."
PS. More seriously, I've come to feel that only a non-profit organization can solve the "walled garden" problem in academic publishing. We need something like a "Mozilla Foundation for Science" -- an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands.
an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands
That's why we have governments.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.
What has undermined public/private solutions is not public opinion or political ideology, but greed, lobbying and corruption. A foundation is nothing but a workaround, and foundations have a history of getting corrupted by the greed and delusions of grandure of its administrators.
It's time we address the real problem. The legacy of thousands of years of civilization is being stolen from us.
Know any donors? I'd love to be involved in a project like this. I wonder if the Wikimedia foundation would be interested--that would do a lot to get over the network effect advantages JSTOR and Elsevier already have.
Additionally, I think that until academic publishing has a standard browser-based solution (MathML, MathJax + Pandoc + LaTeX) outside of PDF that the costs will be prohibitively expensive.
The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage stats, the price of online access per user often works out to several dollars per search...
This is why I've given up trying to work in the field or found a company in the sector... Anyone with an idea and need a technical cofounder? ;)
I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad reviews, and try to revenge on their reviewers, it should be at least in the first years anonymous. The reviews would be voluntary, and also would be rated, just like answers to question in SO. I am a scientist, and I know that reviews have very low quality because of many reasons, such system could perhaps help improving the reviews, while keeping the reviewing process automatized, and reducing its cost to the minimum. In fact, costs of storing papers are low (Arxiv), reviews are free (nobody pays to the scientists anyway, they do it for the community and reputation), and the only cost that is high is the cost of managing the reviews. But if reviews could be automatized then we have a system that is as cheap as Arxiv is, and peer-reviewed :)
In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of time though to popularize it.
Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I mean some people care a lot about that issue, some people don't care very much, but I don't know anyone who is opposed to public access.
So there's an ongoing transition now by researchers/editorial boards/etc to move to a system with lower access costs (some of which involves taking back journal ownership, some doesn't). There's some logistical overhead and fixed costs, but those are falling. It seems like in 20 years (conservatively) all new research will be available to whomever wants it no matter what Elsevier or other companies do in the meantime (the papers may not be literally free, but affordable).
So, like I said initially, I can see how some software for logistics or communication would be helpful, but the main issues don't strike me as technical.
Yes, I actually do:)
Me: Neuroscience PhD at Columbia w/ some a technical background but not a coder.I'm working on going up against academic publishing right now. I have a YC application that is currently being reviewed and I'm in need of a technical cofounder.
Project: Very briefly, I'm working on collecting raw data (positive AND negative), indexing it, and making relationships between datasets. For example, my neuroscience study has relationships to cancer biology, so the data presented to the user would include results from both.
Re: Publishing, I'm going to provide raw data to scientists and create a venue for them to "blog" about these datasets. I think science needs to move incrementally (at internet speed) and get away from taking 3 years to produce a study and publishing a big paper of only positive data. Also, I'd like for the "peer review" portion to be more transparent, so that we can avoid the insane bias that goes into peer review.
Goal 2: Create "big data" by combining small academic science results into a big ass database. Meta data could be the new preliminary data for academic grants.
So yeah, if anyone is interested in playing with this, let me know.
klg2142 @t columbia.edu
Aqui-murdering is a consequence of our financial system. When some big company can get bank money at far less than other companies, let's say 3% just as a hypothetical example, they can buy any business with a 6% cap rate and run it poorly so it only makes a 4% cap and still make a profit. This happens all the time. Meanwhile the entrepreneur cannot get money for anywhere near that and has to actually create real value instead of performing financial arbitrage as these companies with access to the cheap money can.
There was a time when I would've been on board. But I think that time has passed. I have a wife, a new baby, and a nice day job that allows me to enjoy both.
A couple years ago, I spent many nights and weekends working on the academic publishing problem. The effort culminated in a massive hypermedia-style XML schema for distributed and inter-connected publishing, referencing, archiving, etc. There were hundreds of elements just in the common metadata model before I even got around to defining content modules.
Then something hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it was seeing backbone.js for the first time. I realized how quickly web technology was moving forward, how easy it was becoming, and, by contrast, how absolutely shitty it was going to be to write mountains of XSLT on top of my huge DTD. Even in my attempt to create something really different, my approach was still totally clouded by the prevailing anti-wisdom of the academic publishing technology community.
I realized I was on the wrong path. It was a great thought exercise that contributed immeasurably to my day work, but I had to move on.
Happy to share more information if you like, though I'd need to dig the files out of deep storage.
While true, it seemed like a fairly pro-openness company, which not only said the right things but seemed to have a lot of employees genuinely committed to improving the state of academic literature.
But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofit foundation, or at least a forkable open-source version of the platform, seem like necessary prerequisites if you want to ensure that Elsevier-and-co can't buy it out. I guess a company 100%-owned by a strong open-culture advocate could be reliable also, but it gets more complex when investors are in the mix.
Also a reason I don't trust academia.edu compared to, say, the arXiv.
I have personally integrated Mendeley into my process as a student, despite the fact that I should have known better. Sometimes everyone gets distracted by shiny things, I guess. Shame on me.
I really like the way Mendeley handles notes, specifically highlighting / annotating PDFs. Do you know of any alternatives that include this? I was planning on writing my own at some point but it might be a bit ambitious.
My own personal favourite, Papers (papersapp.com), was recently taken over by Springer too. So far, so good--the original team is still running it and there's no sign anything bad will come of it, but I'm still wary of the future.
The Springer-Papers and Elsevier-Mendeley acquisitions are indeed interesting because they've happened at about the same time. It seems that the big publishers want to get a better grip on paper search and/or paper reading habits.
Of course Springer has one of the most onerous paywalls I've come across. I hadn't heard of the Papers acquisition: I use it on my iPad but only because it sucks less than every other solution I've looked at.
Now I'm going to have to e-mail all the friends I advocated Mendeley to, and tell them to consider switching. Serves me right for not looking more carefully at whose interests Mendeley was serving.
Hah, this was exactly the reason I was hesitating to use Mendeley, although it's got great tools. Creating your paper database in such a system is a huge investment in time, it's hard and very frustrating to move between such systems.
AFAIK, the open source tools cannot much the maturity of Mendeley, am I wrong? In this age and time, how hard can it be to clone a service like that?
With Google Reader recently announcing the shutdown, and now this, closed-source cloud-based solutions for organizing and processing my data have started looking increasingly unattractive to me. I guess the only safe way to retain all of your data and prevent commercial interests from affecting its organization is to organize it using (preferably) open-source tools on your own computers, and use the cloud only for backing up the raw data / generated databases so they can be recovered later.
Look at JabRef as a front end to bibtex. I had a bit of a learning curve, but was so frustrated with the Microsoft toolchain that I switched to R/Sweave/LaTeX/bibtex/git and am quite happy. Everything is Open Source and in general community support has been better than commercial support. Since all these are text based, they play well with version control (git). Also makes for a reproducible workflow where an entire analysis and report can be reproduced by a single click on a shell script or command file. The same toolchain works on my Linux, MacOSX, and Windows boxes.
if anything this as just re-injected new life into the elsevier-protests and the sorry state of academic publishing in general.
elsevier's business practices are well documented and the protest is not just manned by some fringe people but has support from prestigious institutions and scholars.
with each new round like this people will educate themselves even more about open access and contemporary free and open source tools for academic work.
zotero probably will win this out and be pushed to mimic mendely features soon enough. zotero already is pretty good but its social features need to developed or integrated with other platforms like arxiv or academia.net.
last not least given googles science-bias and foothold in academia not least with google-scholar and google docs I wonder why they haven't made a move with respect to citation management.
Ideologically I feel like every tax funded researcher (i.e. the vast majority) has an obligation to make all his work publicly accessible.
Change will happen once open access journals get A level status. If there's enough that are sufficiently peer reviewed a simple legislative fix (for state funded/supported education which is the case for most forms of education) would be to treat open access publications preferential when it comes to hireing new academic staff.
As someone with the long term vision of massive changes in education towards e-learning I think the way to attack this is to actually couple OA initiatives with sites like coursera, edx etc.
How deep are the Buffet/Gates pockets, maybe just buying up a bunch of content and freeing it might be the easiest path.
While I am not a researcher and have never used Mendeley et al I do know about Elsevier's reputation.
As mentioned in this blog it would seem the wisest thing would be to switch for the moment and keep an eye on mendeley.
Who knows, maybe they really will change Elsevier, I doubt it but you never know.
After all, given the backlash Elsevier know this is their ONE (long-haul) chance to redeem themselves. Screw this up and they are totally beyond hope (For those who might not think they already are)
Taking inspiration from Star Trek, a new impact factor could be invented to teleport the reputation of a known publication to an alternate publication based on the editorial board. If the board of mathematics reviewers agree to move their effort to another platform, then it follows that the reputation follows the people, not the name of the publication.
It could be that Elsevier is pivoting into an open access model through its other efforts and buying up Mendeley. I won't hold my breath, though. The model, while evolving, could just morph into something else that sucks.
It's a real bummer. There's so much good stuff locked up in these publishing houses.
If Elsivier wants to change its business model, it will need to do it in a way that doesn't completely cannibalize its sales. Adding open research companies to its umbrella would be a way to do that.
However, more likely, it wants to be able to say, "See, we are committed to being open", and continue with its primarily closed practices.
Reminds me of macrobreweries buying microbreweries. The big guys (who make terrible beer) come in and cut costs anywhere they can to increase margins. This includes using cheaper ingredients which decreases the quality of the beer.
I am quite disappointed by this - the next target which hasn't been really picked up yet is Academia.edu though it's purpose is slightly different than Mendeley.
[+] [-] cs702|13 years ago|reply
PS. More seriously, I've come to feel that only a non-profit organization can solve the "walled garden" problem in academic publishing. We need something like a "Mozilla Foundation for Science" -- an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands.
[+] [-] onemorepassword|13 years ago|reply
That's why we have governments.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.
What has undermined public/private solutions is not public opinion or political ideology, but greed, lobbying and corruption. A foundation is nothing but a workaround, and foundations have a history of getting corrupted by the greed and delusions of grandure of its administrators.
It's time we address the real problem. The legacy of thousands of years of civilization is being stolen from us.
[+] [-] roadnottaken|13 years ago|reply
http://www.plos.org/
[+] [-] tomrod|13 years ago|reply
Additionally, I think that until academic publishing has a standard browser-based solution (MathML, MathJax + Pandoc + LaTeX) outside of PDF that the costs will be prohibitively expensive.
[+] [-] hack_edu|13 years ago|reply
This is why I've given up trying to work in the field or found a company in the sector... Anyone with an idea and need a technical cofounder? ;)
[+] [-] pms|13 years ago|reply
In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of time though to popularize it.
What do you think? Could this be done?
[+] [-] pseut|13 years ago|reply
So there's an ongoing transition now by researchers/editorial boards/etc to move to a system with lower access costs (some of which involves taking back journal ownership, some doesn't). There's some logistical overhead and fixed costs, but those are falling. It seems like in 20 years (conservatively) all new research will be available to whomever wants it no matter what Elsevier or other companies do in the meantime (the papers may not be literally free, but affordable).
So, like I said initially, I can see how some software for logistics or communication would be helpful, but the main issues don't strike me as technical.
[+] [-] omnisci|13 years ago|reply
Project: Very briefly, I'm working on collecting raw data (positive AND negative), indexing it, and making relationships between datasets. For example, my neuroscience study has relationships to cancer biology, so the data presented to the user would include results from both.
Re: Publishing, I'm going to provide raw data to scientists and create a venue for them to "blog" about these datasets. I think science needs to move incrementally (at internet speed) and get away from taking 3 years to produce a study and publishing a big paper of only positive data. Also, I'd like for the "peer review" portion to be more transparent, so that we can avoid the insane bias that goes into peer review.
Goal 2: Create "big data" by combining small academic science results into a big ass database. Meta data could be the new preliminary data for academic grants.
So yeah, if anyone is interested in playing with this, let me know. klg2142 @t columbia.edu
[+] [-] narrator|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimilidude|13 years ago|reply
A couple years ago, I spent many nights and weekends working on the academic publishing problem. The effort culminated in a massive hypermedia-style XML schema for distributed and inter-connected publishing, referencing, archiving, etc. There were hundreds of elements just in the common metadata model before I even got around to defining content modules.
Then something hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it was seeing backbone.js for the first time. I realized how quickly web technology was moving forward, how easy it was becoming, and, by contrast, how absolutely shitty it was going to be to write mountains of XSLT on top of my huge DTD. Even in my attempt to create something really different, my approach was still totally clouded by the prevailing anti-wisdom of the academic publishing technology community.
I realized I was on the wrong path. It was a great thought exercise that contributed immeasurably to my day work, but I had to move on.
Happy to share more information if you like, though I'd need to dig the files out of deep storage.
[+] [-] twog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1337biz|13 years ago|reply
There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero et al.
[+] [-] mjn|13 years ago|reply
But it does add another example of why we should be wary of even well-meaning for-profit companies, without some kind of more solid guarantee that they won't sell out in the future. For stuff like this, either a nonprofit foundation, or at least a forkable open-source version of the platform, seem like necessary prerequisites if you want to ensure that Elsevier-and-co can't buy it out. I guess a company 100%-owned by a strong open-culture advocate could be reliable also, but it gets more complex when investors are in the mix.
Also a reason I don't trust academia.edu compared to, say, the arXiv.
[+] [-] glesica|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hemmer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osmium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wannesm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treerex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pitarou|13 years ago|reply
:-(
[+] [-] bmalee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redblacktree|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osiris|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crake|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdf333|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|13 years ago|reply
AFAIK, the open source tools cannot much the maturity of Mendeley, am I wrong? In this age and time, how hard can it be to clone a service like that?
[+] [-] parennoob|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnminter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treerex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
shoot me an email if you want to chat more (it's in my profile)
[+] [-] Altenuvian|13 years ago|reply
elsevier's business practices are well documented and the protest is not just manned by some fringe people but has support from prestigious institutions and scholars.
with each new round like this people will educate themselves even more about open access and contemporary free and open source tools for academic work.
zotero probably will win this out and be pushed to mimic mendely features soon enough. zotero already is pretty good but its social features need to developed or integrated with other platforms like arxiv or academia.net.
last not least given googles science-bias and foothold in academia not least with google-scholar and google docs I wonder why they haven't made a move with respect to citation management.
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
Change will happen once open access journals get A level status. If there's enough that are sufficiently peer reviewed a simple legislative fix (for state funded/supported education which is the case for most forms of education) would be to treat open access publications preferential when it comes to hireing new academic staff.
As someone with the long term vision of massive changes in education towards e-learning I think the way to attack this is to actually couple OA initiatives with sites like coursera, edx etc.
How deep are the Buffet/Gates pockets, maybe just buying up a bunch of content and freeing it might be the easiest path.
[+] [-] Someone|13 years ago|reply
There's no sign of freeing it, though.
[+] [-] rurounijones|13 years ago|reply
As mentioned in this blog it would seem the wisest thing would be to switch for the moment and keep an eye on mendeley.
Who knows, maybe they really will change Elsevier, I doubt it but you never know.
After all, given the backlash Elsevier know this is their ONE (long-haul) chance to redeem themselves. Screw this up and they are totally beyond hope (For those who might not think they already are)
[+] [-] whyenot|13 years ago|reply
Papers purchased by Sinauer in early 2013
... Endnote?
part of Thompson-Reuters
Zotero?
free and open, backed by a major non-profit organization
[+] [-] teyc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccalhoun|13 years ago|reply
Hopefully this will be good news for zotero which is open source.
And hopefully it will be really bad news for endnote which is one of the worst commercial programs I've ever tried to use.
[+] [-] cantankerous|13 years ago|reply
It's a real bummer. There's so much good stuff locked up in these publishing houses.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
However, more likely, it wants to be able to say, "See, we are committed to being open", and continue with its primarily closed practices.
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
The same will happen here.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|13 years ago|reply
http://academia.edu/
[+] [-] shared4you|13 years ago|reply