The Open Publishing Revolution, Now behind one billion-buck Paywall

In 2013, when Victor Henning introduced that his six-12 months-previous startup Mendeley can be obtained by one of the most world’s greatest media companies, he knew there could be blowback. He simply could not have anticipated how unhealthy it could get.

“due to the fact some of our most vocal advocates notion we had bought them out felt awful,” Henning mentioned not too long ago over a tea in Amsterdam, the place Elsevier, Mendeley’s father or mother company, is headquartered.

Launched in 2007 by Henning and two chums at graduate college, Mendeley built an not going but very helpful piece of device—suppose a variation on Evernote mixed with facebook—aimed toward serving to researchers arrange their papers, annotate them, and share them with each and every other.

It hastily took the tutorial world through storm. Researchers beloved the flexibility to search for and in some instances access papers from journals they did not subscribe to—a small protest towards the billion-greenback trade that critics insist serves as a gatekeeper to the sector’s scientific findings. inside a number of years, Mendeley had turn out to be an icon of the “open science” motion.

Enter Elsevier, part of the Dutch publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier, it is one of the crucial world’s “big 4” educational publishers. Amid challenges in other media sectors—and as educational library budgets shrivel up—these publishers have found a way to make handsome earnings. In 2014, Elsevier listed a profit of $1.1 billion on revenues of 3.1 billion, largely by selling person research papers and journal subscriptions.

Digital gross sales now make up two thirds of those earnings, and by means of 2011, Elsevier had already begun mounting its own giant digital initiative. but it lagged behind in expertise. And, like other huge publishers, the corporate loathed Mendeley’s open model; In 2013, it had compelled Mendeley to take away its titles from its database. The thinking behind its acquisition of Mendeley—for a sum rumored to between $sixty nine million and $one hundred million—used to be simple: to squash the chance Mendeley posed to its traditional subscription version, and to personal the ecosystem that Mendeley had built, with its valuable knowledge on the behavior of tens of millions of researchers.

the acquisition impressed rebellion amongst its users. Mendeley used to be branded a sellout. Sean Takats, a professor of history and media at George Mason university and a director of Zotero, a Mendeley various that is fashionable among open science advocates, stated the acquisition used to be similar to heresy. “i’ve nothing towards making a buck,” Takats advised me. “however how will you associate with any individual that’s closed-science?”

When it came, the criticism stung Henning particularly hard; even his former director of R&D, who had left the company rapidly previous to the acquisition, joined within the chorus.

“I had steeled myself for some pretty violent reactions until now,” Henning mentioned. “in any case, I was privy to Elsevier’s reputation and the errors that they had made.”

just a 12 months prior, heaps of researchers, led by way of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers, boycotted Elsevier for lobbying Congress to keep research locked up at the back of paywalls for good, and for making the most of “the free labor of [researchers] and subscription fees from their establishments’ libraries, for a service that has change into generally unnecessary.”

That carrier has helped Elsevier turn into some of the “large four” of academic publishers. Representing 3,057 journals, Elsevier is 2d simplest to just lately merged Springer and Macmillan (which oversees the character publishing crew) in relation to how many titles it controls.

For Elsevier, Mendeley’s walled garden is a valuable new ecosystem, offering a lens into what researchers are working on and what papers they’re on the lookout for, and becoming a funnel, in essence, to sell extra licenses to researchers, libraries, and academic institutions. In its newest annual report, revealed in March, the corporate highlighted “social collaboration through Mendeley” because it announced targets to use extra data from Elsevier products, as well as 0.33-birthday celebration and purchaser information, to “enlarge content coverage” and “to extend content material utility.”

That arrangement, critics say, has led Mendeley far from the open science principles that it once symbolized. And now, full texts of paywalled research not circulate freely across its community, apart from inside private teams.

“once social networks start to get received or evolve, then you end up with a device the place a big organization runs a ‘walled garden,’” said Peter Murray-Rust, a lecturer at the college of Cambridge and an advisory board member on the Open knowledge groundwork. “which you could best get in or get knowledge out through asking permission from the one who owns the garden. Mendeley was and is a walled garden.”

Henning, on the other hand, insists he remains decided to meet the desires of a neighborhood that flourishes on sharing ideas. He factors to a revamped API that allows researchers to plumb its database, which is still available beneath a ingenious Commons license. It now contains research from Elsevier’s catalogs that Mendeley used to be once pressured to cast off. “We’ve kept the guarantees we made once we started out,” Henning contends.

“Our Relationship used to be Schizophrenic”

The acquisition has taken the drive off Mendeley to monetize, and helped preserve the provider free for particular person researchers. it is also made imaginable lengthy-awaited options, like better suggestions and search, as well as an Android app.

And Mendeley retains rising. Its user base—as of this week, at four million folks worldwide—still uploads 1.6 million articles daily, with one hundred,000 new users becoming a member of each month, the corporate said. It counts Stanford, Harvard, and MIT as some of its large, institutional clients, and has doubled the scale of its technical staff, from 40 individuals to 85.

still, even once it joined Elsevier, Henning admits, things weren’t clean crusing. He and the highest of the Mendeley group labored exhausting to find allies within Elsevier to back his firm’s vision for open science. At 35, Henning is most likely one of the most youngest individuals working within the higher echelons of Elsevier, the place he and Mendeley have had to prove they were more than just the “new youngsters.” (In February, amid quite decrease year-on-12 months earnings, the company introduced it would “simplify its company construction.”)

“Our relationship with Elsevier used to be schizophrenic,” Henning mentioned. “that they had asked us to take their papers down from our network. however they backed a number of of our early occasions. They had been supportive of us,” he said.

In recent years, the publisher has been trying to retreat from its harsh image. The behemoth backed down on its enhance for proposed paywall-defending regulation. And it has elevated the collection of open-get right of entry to journals in its offering that folks can learn without spending a dime, but no longer any more significantly than other publishers’ efforts. Henning also pointed to Elsevier’s up to date push for an industry-large policy for publishers to allow sharing of copyrighted material within user groups on collaboration networks, as Mendeley does.

lengthy before big industries blamed the net for disrupting their industry variation—and sooner than startups praised it for a similar motive—scientists embraced it for its original purpose: to lend a hand researchers collaborate across borders and oceans, and create a repository of data which may be simply shared and searched. “ceaselessly,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, then an engineer at CERN, in his initial proposal for a worldwide internet, “the information has been recorded, it just can’t be discovered.”

virtually twenty years later, Henning and two classmates on the German Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Jan Reichelt and Paul Föckler, seen a an identical problem: research used to be generally siloed, and amassing it and sharing it used to be difficult. “I was having a look at things from psychology, business, and philosophy,” he said. “My marketing consultant had to take a seat me down and tell me to remain occupied with one thread of research and go away the opposite stuff as heritage data.”

in the beginning, Mendeley’s biggest draw was that research groups might chat collectively in one situation, share articles, and easily write papers collectively. It fostered collaboration in the cloud. in addition to allowing papers or their abstracts to be shared freely, Mendeley managed all the workflow of researchers’ existence more elegantly than anything had ahead of. Researchers might get entry to their profiles no matter which pc they used, syncing their literature and notes to the cloud, much like Dropbox does now.

And Mendeley’s open API—the primary within the trade—freely supplied metadata on the thousands and thousands of papers that its customers add to the software, like titles, authors, key phrases, and references. That allowed customers to easily search thru its database of papers, and allowed developers to do fascinating issues with that knowledge. In 2010, this was once a fresh, web 2.0 idea in an industry that did not have lots of them.

Henning aggressively constructed a userbase by way of achieving out to open science advocates within the blogosphere and conserving occasions where he preached a imaginative and prescient of making all types of analysis on hand to extra individuals. Mendeley introduced new monetization strategies, like month-to-month fees for consumer teams and an institutional version for entire universities, and raised cash to create the slick piece of instrument that it’s today; investors integrated the backers behind final.fm, Warner song group, and probably the most founders of Skype. In just over four years, Mendeley raised about $12 million. In 2011, Mendeley had 800,000 users worldwide. via 2013, that number surpassed 2 million.

The grand hope was that giant paper-sharing, social networking startups in the open science box—Mendeley but additionally websites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate—might eventually topple giant science publishing stalwarts like Elsevier, much like the unfold of MP3s had carried out to the song business.

The publishing business used to be now not amused. In 2010, David Crotty, senior editor of Journals at Oxford university Press, marveled at Mendeley’s “obvious naïveté in opposition to copyright regulation.” protecting copyright-infringing papers off the carrier often is the right—and winning—thing to do, he wrote, particularly if Mendeley hoped to formally companion with universities. “It’s now not as sexy a route as being a Jolly Roger-hoisting rebellion, but no person ever mentioned that rising up used to be easy.”

Open get entry to advocates are not pirates, they insist. Their goal, they are saying, is to speed up the dissemination of necessary findings via putting off the limitations that journals and their publishers put up.

“Open science is the method of designing your experiment in the open, recording the whole thing overtly,” mentioned Murray-Rust of the Open knowledge basis. “any person with an passion will have to be capable to participate. Ideally, someone on this planet could get right of entry to a researcher’s strategies, materials, and findings. This can also be completed via an open social network, person who’s not controlled with the aid of a commercial organization.”

the larger Mendeley obtained, the more scrutiny it bought. beneath the force of Elsevier and different big publishers, Mendeley had to reduce how brazenly research might course through its channels. eventually the corporate removed Elsevier’s abstracts from the API, as well as its PDF previews in its instrument.

Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former head of R&D, didn’t agree with the moves and left in 2013, explaining his transfer in a weblog publish. He would go on to start a domestic of open-access journals, called PeerJ, with the backing of challenge capitalist Tim O’Reilly.

“there is slightly extra to the story of why Jason left than he let on in his weblog post. either manner, our relationship now is wonderful,” Henning said. “We failed to need to ‘justify’ taking [Elsevier’s data] down. in any case, Elsevier owned the copyright, and we had to comply.”

Three years later, the publishing massive came calling once more, this time to buy. Henning used to be simply 32. “It came to a point where such a lot of our papers and knowledge was once connected to Elsevier,” he stated. “Our industry was so carefully tied with theirs.”

Mendeley’s investors had been keen too. Sean Takats, who oversees Zotero, concedes that a company buyout was once possibly Mendeley’s easiest way to keep afloat. “The ‘trade model’ could never proceed by itself, let alone stand up to the scrutiny of a public offering,” he wrote on the time. For Mendeley, he wrote, “Acquisition used to be always the exit strategy.”

In a blog post on the time in which he defended the acquisition, Henning wrote, “the opportunity to give our users get admission to to higher content, extra knowledge, and faster development was simply too exciting to pass up.” Elsevier “struck us as one of the crucial innovative and tech-savvy publishers out there.” Olivier Dumon, managing director of academic and executive markets for Elsevier, told The occasions of London that “we’re completely aligned in terms of the product, the vision and the advantages this union will deliver to the analysis community.”

After the acquisition was announced, William Gunn, Mendeley’s head of academic outreach, summarized the response on his blog: “There are and shall be a couple competing narratives: They sold us to bury us, we acquired paid heaps of cash so we mentioned, ‘Fuck Open access,’ etc. that is going to be put within the context of Google Reader shutting down, delicious ‘sunsetting,’ and so forth.” He wrote, on the other hand, that, “I’m no longer in my view getting a pile of money from all this, and that i never would have stayed except I used to be definite that they legitimately need to be part of the trade to an open get right of entry to publishing machine.”

whereas numerous users vowed to flee Mendeley for other reference management software, open source possible choices like Zotero stay scarce and underfunded. Scott Cowley, a PhD scholar social media and digital strategy at Arizona State university, described the problem in a touch upon Danah Boyd’s blog publish: “unless there’s a non-revenue undertaking that goes to bat for the academic community, I don’t see with the ability to steer clear of tradeoffs whether or not in expertise or philosophy.”

Takats doesn’t keep careful monitor of Zotero’s consumer numbers, he said, so he can’t make certain if there used to be a mass exodus from Mendeley to his device. Takats isn’t fascinated about revenue: The project makes sufficient cash to maintain itself via promoting storage space, and he does not work on it full-time. It’s just a side project, he mentioned.

The Elsevier technology

put up-acquisition, Mendeley has relaunched its API, the stream of knowledge that allows any developer to dig into its thickets of information; Henning is proud that Elsevier’s PDF previews and abstracts are back in it. “somebody is welcome to take our API and provide you with a better machine.”

still, open science advocates don’t assume an API makes Mendeley open enough. stated Takats: “There’s a distinction between open supply and an open API.”

To in point of fact reform research, Henning mentioned he is taken up a brand new mission: Fixing the process of peer assessment, through which submitted articles are first carefully critiqued by way of researchers in the article’s subject area earlier than publication. Open get entry to analysis hubs like arXiv and the general public Library of Science (PLoS) have sought to remedy this in contemporary years. within the close to future, peer reviewers will be able to annotate papers and notice the other reviewers’ comments right away in Mendeley, prior to e-newsletter. “The editor of the journal would obtain all of these feedback with the aid of email and would simply ship them all to the paper’s authors. The comments would overlap and now and again contradict one every other. We’re ultimately going to keep away from this,” Henning stated.

any other volley against custom may come in the form of a brand new Elsevier acquisition, a London-primarily based information-tracking startup referred to as Newsflo. Its device could supply Mendeley customers a way to monitor their analysis’s impression across the web, and turn out to be a brand new way to gauge success. this sort of various metric is considered one of open science’s methods of rising up against the traditional journal citation device, the place a journal’s affect by myself could make a researcher’s profession.

some other new initiative by using Mendeley and Elsevier is also aimed on the open science neighborhood. This past December, Axon hosted a group of 15 science startups on the LeWeb conference in Paris. Elsevier covered the greater than $1,000 conference charge for each and every startup that came.

Transcriptic, a Silicon Valley-primarily based existence sciences startup, attended LeWeb on Henning’s invitation. Max Hodak, Transcriptic’s CEO, notes that the life sciences trade group is beautiful small, and any possibility to satisfy other startups is efficacious. “i do know these are folks so that it will be doing essential things down the line,” Hodak said of the other taking part startups.

one of the most other startups that participated within the LeWeb conference in the course of the Axon software was The Winnower, a Virginia-based science publishing startup. Josh Nicholson, its CEO and cofounder, doesn’t even use Mendeley. He has spent most of his academic career the usage of competitor EndNote.

but “it’s a ache to make use of,” Nicholson mentioned. soon, he thinks, he’ll switch over to Mendeley.