University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

> Elsevier In Advanced Talks To Buy Mendeley For Around \$100M To Beef
> Up In Social, Open Source Educ\...
> [tcrn.ch/W8L5io](http://t.co/XG2RLZaH "http://tcrn.ch/W8L5io") by
> @[ingridlunden](https://twitter.com/ingridlunden)
>
> --- TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) [January 17,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/291911075182542848){data-datetime="2013-01-17T14:13:18+00:00"}

  
  
The rumour that Elsevier is buying [Mendeley](http://www.mendeley.com)
has been greeted with a mixture of horror, anger, peppered with a few
congratulations, I told you so\'s, and touting for new customers:  
  

> Oh FFS, nooooooo! MT
> @[phylogenomics](https://twitter.com/phylogenomics): Elsevier In
> Advanced Talks To Buy Mendeley For Around \$100M
> [techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/els...](http://t.co/6slZsVDi "http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/elsevier-mendeley-education/")
> via @[techcrunch](https://twitter.com/techcrunch)
>
> --- Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) [January 17,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/SiouxsieW/status/291975944753790977){data-datetime="2013-01-17T18:31:04+00:00"}

> .@[srp](https://twitter.com/srp)
> @[dancohen](https://twitter.com/dancohen) I imagine a coin flip deep
> within the Elsevier Headquarters Cave, using a gold, custom-minted BUY
> OR SUE coin.
>
> --- Jason Priem (@jasonpriem) [January 17,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/jasonpriem/status/291934527343972352){data-datetime="2013-01-17T15:46:29+00:00"}

> By the way, over here @ Zotero headquarters
> (@[chnm](https://twitter.com/chnm)) we welcome all Mendeley users to a
> truly open platform for research
> [zotero.org](http://t.co/odrENqeT "http://zotero.org")
>
> --- Dan Cohen (@dancohen) [January 17,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/dancohen/status/291928520391798784){data-datetime="2013-01-17T15:22:37+00:00"}

  
  
Here\'s some probably worthless speculation to add to the mix.
Disclosure: I use Mendeley to manage 100,000\'s of references, and use
the API for various projects. I\'m not paying customer (but I do pay for
some Internet services such as DropBox, BackBlaze, and Spotify, so it\'s
not that I won\'t pay, it\'s just that the service Mendeley charge for
doesn\'t interest me). I\'ve published in Elsevier journals (most
recently a couple of papers that, thanks to the efforts of Paul Craze,
editor of TREE, are \"free\" in the sense you can download the PDF for
free), and I took part in the [Elsevier Grand
Challenge](http://www.elseviergrandchallenge.com/).  
  
So, given that I\'m suitably compromised, here are some thoughts.  
  

### Elsevier suck

  
Elsevier are big, ugly, and at the corporate level are doing things that
actively make researchers angry (see [The Cost of
Knowledge](http://thecostofknowledge.com/)).  
  

### Elsevier rocks

  
Elsevier are one of the most innovative science publishers around. They
[fund challenges](http://appsforscience.com/), are investing heavily in
interactive and semantic markup of papers (for example, [interactive
phylogenies](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/12/elsevier-articles-have-interactive.html)),
and have built an app ecosystem on their publishing platform.  
  

### Mendeley sucks

  
Mendeley is suffering some from serious failings, most of which could be
addressed with sufficient resources. The API sucks, mostly because
Mendeley themselves don\'t actually use it. The Desktop client
communicates with Mendeley\'s database using a different protocol, hence
the API lacks the functionality needed to make truly great apps on the
platform. The algorithms Mendeley use to de-duplicate their catalogue
are flawed, occasionally [creating entirely fictional
entries](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/09/phantom-articles-why-mendeley-needs-to.html).  
  

### Mendeley rocks

  
The way Mendeley engineered the creation of a bibliographic database in
the cloud is genius, as is their recognition that the object around
which scientists will cluster is the article, not the author. They
helped foster the altmetrics movement, and have a great presence on
Twitter and at conferences (i.e., you can talk to actual people who
write code).  
  

### What happens next?

  
Let\'s assume that Elsevier does, indeed, buy Mendeley, and wants to do
interesting things with Mendeley, and that Mendeley doesn\'t become one
of the many startups that have a successful \"exit\" for the founders
but ends up dying in the bosom of a larger company. Here are some
possibilities.  
  

#### Mendeley becomes iTunes for papers

  
Forget the \"Last.fm\" of papers, what about the \"iTunes of papers\"?.
Big publishers are facing a revolt over the cost of institutional
subscriptions, and journals are increasingly irrelevant as aggregations.
The literature that people read is widely scattered across different
outlets. Journals are archaic in the same way that music albums are
mostly a thing of the past, people mix and match singles.  
  
In the recent fight between UC Davis and *Nature*, *Nature* estimated
that [\"CDL will be paying roughly \$0.56 per
download\"](http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html). So, why not
charge a buck a paper? Mendeley\'s web interface is practically crying
out for a \"BUY THIS PAPER\" button. Under this model, Elsevier has an
outlet for its content that doesn\'t force people to subscribe to large
amounts of stuff they don\'t want. Mendeley could be used to establish a
relationship directly with paying customers, rather than institutions.  
  

#### Mendeley becomes the de facto measure of research impact

  
But combining Mendeley\'s readership data with citations, Elsevier could
construct powerful measures of research impact, bringing altmetrics into
the mainstream. Couple this with links to institutions, and Elsevier
could provide universities with all the data they need to evaluate
academic performance (gulp).  
  

#### Mendeley becomes an authoring tool

  
Managing references and inserting citations into manuscripts is one of
the basic tasks facing an academic author. Authoring tools are evolving
in the direction of being online, and embedding more semantic markup
(e.g., these are taxon names, this is a chemical compound, this is a
statement of causality). In a sense reference lists are the one form of
structured markup we are already familiar with. Why not build on that
and create an authoring platform?  
  

#### Mendeley becomes the focus of post-publication review

  
Publishers have failed to crack the problem of post-publication review.
Several provide the ability for readers to comment on an article online,
but this has failed to take off. I think this is because the sociology
is wrong, if you want a conversation you need to go where the people
are, not expect them to come to you. Given that people are bookmaking
papers in Mendeley, the next step is to get them to comment, or
aggregate their annotations (in the same way that Amazon\'s Kindle can
show you passages that others have highlighted).  
  
Interesting times\...


The rumour that Elsevier is buying Mendeley has been greeted with a mixture of horror, anger, peppered with a few congratulations, I told you so's, and touting for new customers:Here's some probably worthless speculation to add to the mix. Disclosure: I use Mendeley to manage 100,000's of references, and use the API for various projects.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

Thoughts on Mendeley and Elsevier