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Comment by happyhappy007 | Hacker News Reader

Quoting one of the comments from Techcrunch which I think should be upvoted:

"disgraceful that they spent their whole life as a company arguing that they were the next big thing in open publishing only to sell out to the most unethical monolith in closed publishing out there. no doubt el$evier will enjoy slowly ripping apart what's left of mendeley and continuing with its centuries-old business model of making money off the back of researchers' freely provided knowledge.

nice to see your true colours team mendeley!"

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I don't want to comment on a comment, so I'd prefer to point you to Mendeley's official blog post on this topic here: http://blog.mendeley.com/start-up-life/team-mendeley-is-join...

If there are more questions, we have put together a couple questions and answers here: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-join...

Finally, if there are still lingering questions, we're more than happy to answer them here or directly with us on twitter @rvidal / @mendeley_com / @mendeleysupport And there's always email: support@mendeley.com :)

Do you really not understand how fundamentally anti-open-access Elsevier is? Have you not seen what happens to the other companies they absorb? Many of us have experience in this particular field and it's not a pleasant one.

Your official blog post is inane marketing-speak that has no basis in the reality of the damage Elsevier has done and continues to do to the fabric of science publishing. Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.

I have a feeling people aren't going to wait a year to start on an open replacement given the cartoonishly awful reputation Elsevier has.

Cartoonish is right.

Not only are they horribly exploitative towards the academics and librarians who by and large both write and purchase what Elsevier publishes, they also ... sponsor arms fairs! whee!

I'm sorry you have such sour feelings about Elsevier. I can't really comment much about that. However, I can speak for what I know from Mendeley and I can tell you that we have projects planned that span farther than the one year abyss you mention. We're excited and looking forward to maintaining our company culture, work ethic, and the ultimate goal of building a useful tool and resource that helps our users.

I know exactly how bad Elsevier has been and I've spent most of my career with Mendeley campaigning against them. If anyone has the right to be mad about this, it would be me, but I've actually had the chance to speak with folks there, from the CEO on down, and I really believe they see something valuable in us.

There have been detailed discussions about how Mendeley can integrate with parts of Elsevier like Scopus and Science Direct. I don't think they would have gone through all that effort just to bury it. I could be wrong, but I think things are changing at Elsevier and I think bringing us in is part of that.

How do I cancel my Mendeley account?

Edit: If you log in to your account and go to account details there's a "delete your account" link at the bottom. When you click the link you get a dialogue box that says this:

We're sorry you want to go, but if you must... Deleting your account will remove all of your personal data from Mendeley Web, and limit the functionality of Mendeley Desktop. Your data is still present in Mendeley Desktop so it can be archived or exported.

If your profile is visible to search engines then Mendeley may show up in relevant search results until the search engines re-index the site (this is an ongoing process but should occur within a couple of weeks.) Until this occurs, clicking on the search result link will load a Mendeley page stating that the profile cannot be found.

I just went down the same path, make sure to leave a statement (but keep it civil) in the free text field when you delete your account.

How about giving it a month or two to see if things really are that bad? I understand you have no reason to trust Elsevier, but Mendeley has been a staunch advocate of open access from the very beginning, so I really do think we'll bring more openness. At the very least, we've earned that.

Really hope you guys have autonomy to keep it going kind of independently, specially with stuff like Open API.

Good luck there in this new path!

The API will remain open: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-join...

What I don't understand about this quote is this:

>disgraceful that they spent their whole life as a company arguing that they were the next big thing in open publishing

Mendeley is not a publishing company.

"Elsevier tried to sneak in legislation through lobbying – the so-called Research Works Act – that was to undo the National Institute of Health’s Open Access mandate and therefore would have prevented public access to millions of bio-medical research papers. They had to pull back after outrage and boycotts from the academic community.

Our vision is to crack this open by, first of all, encouraging academics to be aware of their rights, be aware of the lobbying that is going on, and also by enabling them to post their own publications over which they retain copyright, from their Mendeley profiles. A ton of papers have been made available by Mendeley in this way, by academics uploading their own papers. So, that’s our attempt at making content more accessible and science more open."

Quoted from the founder in an interview just a few months ago (17 September 2012). Speaks for itself really.

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/qa/3322/cracking-open-scie...

Thanks for digging it out. Upvoted!

It does speak for itself, in that Victor and many other Mendeley staff stand by their opposition to the Research Works Act. We believe that the SOPA blackout protests (which we participated in), and the Cost of Knowledge boycott have led Elsevier to start addressing the issues people have had with them. Some things will be quick to change, others more slowly.

The morals of our staff haven't changed overnight, and we'll continue to try and push Elsevier towards a future with a greater emphasis on open science. There's no contradiction here, just a huge challenge on our part.

(Full disclosure, I'm a designer at Mendeley)

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