I just hope it doesn’t become the first blog community where reading is free but you have to pay to publish your comment. After all they will be spending a lot of money of server time and bandwidth.

But, as I’m giving a whole business model to them, let’s just have it in a complete package. I mentioned why Mendeley open-sourcing its apps would make sense. But still they have people backing them up, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hire everyone and their cousins. They also need to put food on their families plates, even though the backers might be millionaires.

It really makes sense for Mendeley to open-source and there’s an easy way for them to make money even being completely open. They have something no one has, with the exception maybe of Thomson-Reuters. They have a rich database, they have information, precious data. But stored data doesn’t make a profit. Stored data is there to be analysed, it needs to be crunched, checked, tabulated. Why not charge for it? You’re a journal publisher and want to check how many people are reading what, how’s the competition doing? Yep, you can check our db, and there’s a price to do that. You’re a company that wants to index your publications, metadata, etc? We provide the service and you pay a fee. You’re a grad student that wants to do some research? Hey, you have 100 free searches every day for free, if you pass over that number, you pay a penny for each extra search.

There are many other options of revenue. You can make deals with libraries and offer them database and distribution rights in order to mine their internal searches, etc. Each University will have its own rules, so that might be slow in the beginning, but if someone pays millions to have PeopleSoft installed, they can pay something to have the clever guys from Mendeley to take care of their library back-end (don’t mess with librarians).

I was criticized by Rod Page that by opening Mendeley’s source it would be pointless, but from the perspective of a comapny PR and community support that would be huge. Open what you can, profit from what no one has. Who knows if there’s some brilliant hacker that only with the API can make a better desktop client? Are you afraid of that Mendeley? Or you are afraid that your code is so messy that you are going to be criticized for it?

At this point we can only conjecture on what they are going to do, they want you to open your data, but they don’t want to give you something else back, something that won’t cost them much and at the same time will make them the champions of a community that is known to give things back.

They ask what side are you on, but they don’t tell where they are. At least not completely.

We came to the conclusion that technology is finally at a point that if we don’t use it now, then we are holding back the progress of science. And what exactly are we to use technology on? Open science/data/access.

Yes, use Mendeley. More and more, and then Science will be open.

For the past three centuries those two requirements could not be satisfied due to a lack of technology, but why are we not fulfilling them now? We have the tech (i.e. Internet), so something else is going on. It is easy to place the blame on publishers trying to protect business models, but that would be misplaced judgment. The business models for Open Access and Open Data are there, trust me (or go ask PLoS). Publishers are already experimenting with the models, but they are waiting for something before going full force. They are waiting for us, the researchers.

Thank you, Internet (whoever you are). Without you Science wouldn’t reach the point it is now. Wait, what? Yes, the business models are there, trust him, or just ask PLoS for all the money they are charging, and when you meet someone that is not blessed with technology (==money) and cannot publish on open access (they publish for free, but you have to wait), you can tell them the story of a place where tehcnology (==money) blesses everyone and all data flows free and papers are stored (for a price) on Mendeley’s servers.

Each time we hold back data or publish research that isn’t immediately open to all, we have chosen to be on the wrong side of history

And that’s your fault to be on the wrong side of history and good people. You are evil and your wife, husband, kids need to eat, but you don’t have tenure and you hide your data; that’s all you want: to hide your data and not show to anyone, because your contract is expiring in a couple of months and if you publish in a good journal they might renew it. Cut the chains that bind you to the oppressors, come to the right side, and store your references and papers (limited quantity) on Mendeley’s servers.

We could wait for policy changes from the top, but that is neither a timely, nor guaranteed solution

Post-docs and graduate students of the world unite, non-ternured staff too. Next time your boss or supervisor asks you to not disclose some data, tell them to go to hell, resign and go work for some Open Science advocate, or Mendeley (I heard they have quite good internships there)

Platforms such as Mendeley can have a hand in meeting both the first and second conditions. Mendeley is more than just a reference manager, it is also a system that aggregates the metadata of millions of documents and provides authors the opportunity to promote their works. We are now taking this one step further having created the beginnings of an author analytics platform.

There’s no free lunch out there. All that revolution-in-the-academics yada yada yada to come to the conclusion that Mendeley will solve everything, because it’s more than just a reference manager. It aggregates data and metadata (for a price) and gives me, you, the guy-next-door to promote works. Just like a journal. But it also gives you analytics: you will know how many bots accessed your paper or Mendeley farms were trained to add your papers, so it inflates the analytics and you get tenure because of that. Mendeley will do that for a price too, don’t you think? I don’t trust people that plays with censorship.

A publication snapshot is nothing earth shattering and it has a long way to grow. It has many valid concerns, such as gaming that must be accounted for. Fundamentally though, this is not just another metric to base the next grant or tenure selection upon, although eventually it could/should be used that way. To the point, this is about being on the right side of history in promoting Open Science.

That explains a lot. It shouldn’t be used, but it might. Eventually. But you will be on the right side. It gets to a point that I need a compass, or for the technology blessed, a GPS.

But it ends on a high note

Those researchers who openly and quickly publish research or data for download will be rewarded.* Those who do not will adapt or risk falling into obscurity. As we wait for policy changes to be enacted by the top, we must act at the bottom to encourage a behavioral change in how we share our knowledge. I think we owe that to the students, hipsters, and citizens in coffee shops everywhere.

I never understood why sharing the knowledge means opening all your data. Why paper access metrics should be used to measure something real. It’s nice to have a highly accessed paper on BMC, but you know that some of the hits came from you or maybe colleagues. And why the changes have to come from below? If I don’t have tenure, or I’m only a student I can try changing, but the final word always comes from who signs the check that feeds your family.

Which side of history will you be on?

I never understood why I should pick a side, or why someone in a company (with thugs) should challenge me to pick a side. I don’t know which side I’m on, I know History is define by powerful people, even though the burden and the work is carried by the silent millions. The only thing I could say about sides, is that I want to be on Mendeley’s opposite one, even if it becomes the standard for anything. I don’t side with censorship, hype and hot air.

*Exactly how that is rewarded through our search and recommendation engines has yet to be implemented, as we need to balance relevance as much as reputation.

Give me the source code of Mendeley and I will tell you how to implement. After all, it’s easy to be open with someone else’s stuff. Also, I’m looking forward to get Jason’s email with a link to all the projects he’s working on at the moment and all the data he ever generated. History is better set by example.

PS: Comments from anyone financially involved with Mendeley, especially the thugs, will be blocked.

No, the web’s future (or The Future of the Web) is much larger than Facebook. The future of the web is an application that allows you to play in the financial market, find conferences and even plot a map with them, can analyse the stars, check browser histories, do science and screw the life of your worst enemies with a complex syntax and obscure data typing. I might have forgotten that this application saved lives in Haiti, intends to bring peace to the Middle East (via a very elaborate graph) and even solve the Tea Party issue in US (via a very elaborate graph). The future of the web (or the web’s future) is the one and only R. R can do everything and a little bit more.

But what R cannot do is find you a girlfriend. Or at least I haven’t read about. Until then, I’m a skeptic.

He seems almost proud of his own narcissism. As if people were just waiting with bated breath for him to grace his audience with another tit-for-tat in this petty feud. Oh what an inconvenience it is for him to have to update his own douchey blog.

I can’t tell who is worse: PZM or the people who look to him for what they should think about any issue.

Thank you, thank you. Whoever you are.

Think now that the Pepsigate (really? Newsweek. Slow news day?) would become, in a excellent fit, the Pepsifountain.

More Pepsi for everyone!!

I cannot wait until all the omics for all bodily fluids are uncovered: “Saliva Ontology: An ontology-based framework for a Salivaomics Knowledge Base”

Ai, J., Smith, B., & Wong, D. (2010). Saliva Ontology: An ontology-based framework for a Salivaomics Knowledge Base BMC Bioinformatics, 11 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-11-302