Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.

Your assumption is that now Mendeley is going to suddenly shed it's sheep's clothing and reveal itself to be a wolf. As a Mendeley employee (and a scientist, not a PR person), you may not believe me or you may think I'm just naive but I think you will have to wait and see.

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.

All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?

No, they're leaving: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o...

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."

They are not leaving. This one person left, a while ago. Correlation or causation, I can't speak for him.

Maye this person that left knew something like this would happen. The timing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the ones thst stay are linked to a publisher that has no morals, no ethics.

This week? No. One, two, or more years down the road? We shall see.

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.

The same PR team that is flooding social media with the usual spiel will be given maybe a 6-month 1-year contract and will be gone soon.

All these employees, including the CEO, are no longer in control anymore; the owner, Elsevier, is in control and is not an impartial 'financial investor' but an 'strategic investor' with a larger stake in the industry than the whole of Mendeley.

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.

No, they turned into useful idiots.

No, but with gradual attrition due to fundamental disagreements with the new management, I imagine the character of the company will change significantly within the year, if not sooner.

No, they just became employees of a corporation that use unethical tactics in publishing. You end up guilty by association.

PR is irrelevant to "open". Either the product is or isn't. Academics should be smart enough is it isn't.

Academics usually like shiny things, specially free. And Mendeley didn't target the old school ones, they targeted students, post-docs, usually the trend-setters in the academic environment. Professors and Senior Researchers are too busy or don't have time to check these things, and they end up using what other people use in their labs.

And for broke, internet saavy students, free stuff with a promise of a new groundbreaking trend in science was enough to lure them.

Still wondering how academia.edu got approved for an edu domain name. Screams scam to me.

In the early days there wasn't a formal process for .edu approval. There was a bit of netiquette that educational institutions should register under .edu, nonprofits under .org, network providers under .net, and companies under .com.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com