The Open Publishing Revolution, Now Behind A Billion-Dollar Paywall | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-04-18

Summary:

" ... Enter Elsevier. The publisher boasts the largest market share in the scientific publishing industry—it made $3.2 billion in 2013 on its titles—and it had already begun mounting its own giant digital initiative, but lagged behind in technology. And it, like other large publishers, loathed Mendeley's open model; In 2013, it had forced Mendeley to remove its titles from its database. The thinking behind its acquisition of Mendeley—for a sum rumored to between $69 million and $100 million—was simple: to squash the threat Mendeley posed to its traditional subscription model, and to own the ecosystem that Mendeley had constructed, with its valuable data on the behavior of millions of researchers. The purchase inspired revolt among its users. Mendeley was branded a sellout. Sean Takats, a professor of history and media at George Mason University and a director of Zotero, a Mendeley alternative that's popular among open science advocates, says the acquisition was akin to heresy. 'I have nothing against making a buck,' Takats says. 'But how can you partner with someone that’s closed-source?' When it came, the criticism stung Henning especially hard; even his former director of R&D, who had left the company shortly prior to the acquisition, joined in the chorus ... 'Once social networks start to get acquired or evolve, then you end up with a system where a large organization runs a ‘walled garden,''  says Peter Murray-Rust, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and an advisory board member at the Open Knowledge Foundation. 'You can only get in or get information out by asking permission from the person who owns the garden. Mendeley was and is a walled garden.'  Henning, however, insists he remains determined to meet the needs of a community that thrives on sharing ideas. He points to a revamped API that allows researchers to plumb its database, which is still available under a Creative Commons license. It now incorporates research from Elsevier's catalogs that Mendeley was once forced to remove. "We’ve kept the promises we made when we began," he says ... And Mendeley keeps growing. Its user base—as of this week, at 4 million people worldwide—still uploads 1.6 million articles every day, with 100,000 new users joining every month, the company says. It counts Stanford, Harvard, and MIT as some of its big, institutional customers, and has doubled the size of its technical team, from 40 people to 85 ..."

Link:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3042443/mendeley-elsevier-and-the-future-of-scholarly-publishing

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.profits oa.mendeley oa.open_science oa.social_networks oa.debates

Date tagged:

04/18/2015, 07:30

Date published:

04/18/2015, 03:29