I don't get it. It was absolutely clear that they were using a propiretory software owned by a for-profit company.
There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero et al.
There a perfectly viable alternatives, Open Source and free to use e.g. Zotero et al.
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'm not 100% behind the Mendeley hate right now, but they're against all odds. While everything I've heard from the team so far, including on the prominent HN threads, has been reassuring and positive, it's still just words.
People are making predictions about the future right now, and no words will be able to sway public opinion. Only action, and time. It seems Mendeley (or, as of now, Elsevier) are betting on the latter, because there has been no action, only PR.
Choice quote: "For that reason then I co-founded PeerJ, an Open Access journal, with one aim of never being in the position to take shit ever again from a closed publisher."
It means that a week ago CEO could make the same promises and be heard seriously, but the same CEO promises right now are not worth the paper they're not written on.
Now at any point in the future all the Mendeley 'openness' promises can be easily broken by Elsevier, so they either know that all the promises they're making now are empty (i.e., lying intentionally) or they don't know that (then they're naive and incompetent as general managers).
Promises can be made by those in control. Leaders in public companies can be considered in control. Leaders in privately held companies can be considered in control if their public vision and roadmap is aligned with the owner. But if the owner has a clear interest to change the roadmap - then it would be imprudent to rely on such a roadmap. Elsevier has a reputation of intentionally sabotaging projects (say, gov't initiatives) that should bring openness - if they fool you twice, shame on you.
And for broke, internet saavy students, free stuff with a promise of a new groundbreaking trend in science was enough to lure them.
Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.
That started being enforced for .edu in 2001, but previous registrants were grandfathered in. The registrar did manage to evict a bunch of the questionable .edus in 2003, by stepping up enforcement of technical requirements, such as the requirement to have accurate whois information, and to be responsive via the whois-registered email address. But presumably academia.edu survived that purge. I can't actually think of any other prominent for-profit company that still retains an .edu. The registrar also now prohibits transferring them, so you can't buy one even if some others have survived (though maybe you could lease it).
Even right here on HN there have been many posts about such situations some time after acquisitions; and Elsvier reasonably does have practical motivation to interfere here and there.
Such arms-length separations are often published in mergers&acquisitions PR and practically never happen in practice, they all get abused - should we really believe that Elsevier is so exceptionally more etchical than most other companies?
They have that "remote" in their hands. They have promised not to use it. Will they?
I chose it a few months ago over mendeley because it allowed me to search in the PDF annotations, which isn't possible with mendeley. I recall mendeley could search notes added to a PDF file (one text area for the whole file), but not within sticky notes attached to specific pages, so it was impossible to search the annotations I made and also have those annotations appear on the relevant part of the PDF.
The other thing I like about qiqqa is that it allows us to have a shared library on our local server, instead of having to send all our data to the cloud.
Both are great desktop tools for full text search across many PDF files, even those that need OCR. Before I was using google desktop for this function, and qiqqa is definitely a step up.
Or build it yourself if so inclined/able: