The Mendeley Dilemma » Cyborgology

"I really love putting things in order: Around my house you’ll find tiny and neat stacks of paper, alphabetized sub-folders, PDFs renamed via algorithm, and spices arranged to optimize usage patterns. I don’t call it life hacking or You+, its just the way I live... My tendency for digitally augmented organization has also made me a bit of a connoisseur of citation management software. I find little joy in putting together reference lists and bibliographies, mainly because they can never reach the metaphysical perfection I demand. Citation management software however, gets me close enough. When I got to grad school, I realized by old standby, ProQuest’s Refworks wasn’t available and my old copy of Endnote x1 ran too slow on my new computer. So there I was, my first year of graduate school and jonesing heavily for some citation management. I had dozens of papers to write and no citation software. That’s when I fell into the waiting arms of Mendeley...  Like any piece of software that runs on OS X and contains a database, Mendeley described its interface as 'iTunes-like.' And while the interface was pretty  polished, that wasn’t what sold me. Mendeley was an organizer’s dream. It renamed and organized all of my PDFs just the way I wanted them. It had a burgeoning social function as well, which was interesting, but the userbase was still too small to be useful. For me, Mendeley was a well-designed piece of software that did exactly what I needed it to do, without memory leaks or an obtuse user interface. I had an impeccably organized PDF library and I was happy. Citing papers was almost an afterthought. Then, late last week, I got some really bad news on Twitter from @anneohirsch ... Elsevier isn’t the worst company in the world. They’re not dumping millions of gallons of oil into coastal ecosystems, nor are they a massive mercenary army that kills for top dollar. They are a publishing house and they make money by controlling the distribution of the knowledge that I and fellow academics produce ...  But Elsevier does not always respect the trust that many have bestowed upon them. From 2000 to 2005 Elseveir published six periodicals that looked like peer reviewed medical journals but were actually nothing more than paid advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. They have lobbied against open-access publishing via the Research Works Act, and have sued their own customers on ambiguous legal grounds. They even sued The Vandals for their parody of the Variety magazine logo. They are despicable enough to warrant a dedicated, popular campaign calling on academics to boycott their journals. The Cost of Knowledge campaign has amassed over thirteen thousand signatories in a little over a year. One of my most-used tools, something that I rely on to do my work almost every day, will most likely be bought by this very large company. My methods courses did not prepare me for this ... What am I supposed to do when my digital tools are bought by a large corporation that I hate? Do I add my citation management software to the list of things in this world that I rely on but don’t condone? Or do I run to the opposite extreme and disavow all digital tools in my work? ... At this point, you might be asking, 'what is Elsevier going to do with Mendeley that warrants uninstalling it from you computer?' When I first heard about Mendeley’s possible acquisition I posted the story to the Academic Publishing subreddit. One of the commenters made a really good point that gets at the heart of the matter. Here’s the full comment: 'Ah-HAH! See??? I told you alllllllll!!! Publishers love snapping up reference managers, because they know that an uncontrolled reference manager product will encourage storing and sharing libraries, taking them out of the