At the very least, you can’t expect the industry to show widespread support for a venture that directly threatens their business model. Given that the market for reference managers is so crowded, there’s no reason for a publisher to support and legitimize Mendeley over any of the other companies/sites that do the same thing but don’t offer copyright infringement as one of their features.

If publishers think they can protect a revenue stream by fighting distribution of PDFs, history suggests they’re going to be in for an expensive and ultimately counterproductive game of whack-a-mole.

I agree that there’s a lot that the publishing industry needs to be concerned about, and I would like to continue to discuss that, but I’d like to start at some point beyond “home taping is killing music”.

I do agree that there’s great potential in what Mendeley is doing, and that the Napster functionality is just a small part of the picture, one that could easily be disposed of. But for most publishers, it’s a dealbreaker. Get rid of that, and you’d see a flood of partners come on board, as there are all kinds of ways we could work together to make both of our products better.

The impact factor is an argument for another day. I think it’s a good concept, but poorly implemented (any rating system that’s not transparent and replicable is fatally flawed). There are major issues with most of the other proposed measurements as well, so probably some combination of things would work best.

The position of Mendeley, after seeking legal counsel, is that their use is fair use. Since they’ve got advice from people who really do know the ins and outs of that area of the law, I tend to believe them when they say that they’ve thoroughly thought this through and had enough discussions with stakeholders that all sides are pretty much on board at this point. Worries about whether or not someone might object can be solved simply by looking at what the stakeholders are doing.

Like I said above (or below or wherever this comment ends up ), it wasn’t my intention to turn this into a discussion all about Mendeley, but what, in your expert opinion, can Mendeley do to make it more obvious to publishers that this is in fact what their customers want?

Academics want an easy and open (no proprietary data formats) way to manage their papers and to manage citations of those papers within their manuscripts. They want to be better able to keep up with the relevant literature now that there’s far too much to keep up with via keyword searches or TOC alerts. They also want to know how much interest their publications are getting.

The impact factor of the journal it’s published in has been proven to be a really crappy way of measuring research impact, so institutions want a better way to know how how much influence and impact their research groups have. They understand that research monies could be spent far more effectively if they had better stats about what and who is really making a difference and who’s just getting published because his PhD advisor has a plum study section/advisory board seat.

Libraries are struggling on one side with the mandate to set up institutional repositories and have researchers contribute materials to it and on the other side with poor compliance from their researchers in depositing the material. This is another place where Mendeley fits in perfectly.

I hope this helps illustrate that the value of Mendeley doesn’t actually depend on or require Napster-like file sharing. The “shared collections” feature is just one little feature, designed to save someone a little time at the copy machine. The value of the service, and the vision of the company, is much broader than that.

There are economic and other differences with mp3′s. But I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes from a legal point of view. A piece of copyrighted material is a piece of copyrighted material, and if you redistribute it without permission, you may be breaking the law. I’m really surprised Mendeley didn’t go for a P2P solution but instead decided to act as the redistributor themselves, which opens up all kinds of legal cans of worms. It’s almost like the company has been set up to provoke a lawsuit to try to set legal precedents in as favorable a light as possible.

Where is the line drawn? If you can infringe copyright on a scientific paper, can you also do so on a textbook if you’re using it for discussion as well? Can I upload a Discovery Channel tv show and give it away if I use it in the same way? Why is it okay to share among 10 people, but not 11? Isn’t Mendeley’s sharing viral, so I can share with 10 people, they each can share with 10 and so on? Fair Use does take into account the nature of the use of the infringement, but it’s unclear how much that would weigh in any decision. Again, we’ll never know until a judge makes a ruling.

For publishers, it’s unclear if what Mendeley is offering is of interest to a majority of customers. And there’s also a balance involved–there’s no point in angering your customers if you don’t have to, but there’s no point in keeping them happy by putting yourself out of business. If Mendeley were to catch on, and a Napsterization occurred, and subscriptions started being canceled en masse, you can bet all those publishing partners would turn pretty quickly. Just because people want stuff for free doesn’t mean that’s the only acceptable path to the future. I want a pony, but so far I’ve been unable to convince any stable to give me one based on a threat they’ll lose me as a customer if they don’t.

As far as disclosure, I tend to think like an editor, and I want to know when there’s a potential conflict of interest, even if the author is being completely honest and unbiased (and I do think you’re doing that here). Not sure the best way to do that, but in a forum like this where there’s space, it’s good to add an aside for something like that.

The comparison to mp3 sharing is an easy one to make, but I do think it breaks down in a couple important ways. First, the whole economics of the situation are different. You don’t have publishing companies picking a picking a small fraction of authors and giving them millions of dollars to write material which is then consumed by a mostly non-author audience. Academic journals need their audience because they’re both the producers and consumers, and they can’t afford to piss them off. Second, there’s not really an equivalent of a journal club among mp3 listeners. Yes, people do get together and listen to music, but journal clubs are where the majority of article discussion goes on so it’s much more of an institution. The case for fair use is even stronger here because of the explicitly educational/academic purpose of this application. Finally, we’ve been through this already. I don’t blame recording companies for freaking out and trying to maintain their privileged middleman status they way they did. However, we now know that doesn’t work. Journal publishers want to work with Mendeley because they (most of them, anyways) are looking ahead to the future. Sure, one company could sue, but not only would they almost certainly lose, the potential winnings aren’t that great even if they win, and the risk that they’d lose contributors and readers is very real and significant. On the bright side, the possibility they might stay relevant well into the next decade looks pretty good as they adapt to the new ways academics are beginning to work.

It’s great to hear you say you think Mendeley has one of the best platforms out there. They’ve worked very hard at it and continue to listen closely to what people want. I don’t mean to turn this into a discussion about Mendeley, but so I’ll just end saying that there are opportunities Mendeley has discussed internally which are pretty cool and very much represent a win-win for all parties involved.

It’s another tangent, but the disclosure thing has generally worked like this: I generally sign comments with my Mendeley email address and a link to my profile, which indicates that I have a special relationship with them and when I’m speaking on Mendeley’s behalf, I so indicate.

How could I make it more clear? Because you can’t include a disclaimer in the message on twitter, I’ve gotten used to just having that information available via a link. There’s also the issue that although I do work with Mendeley, it’s in a consulting sort of role, not an employee-employer relationship. As you know from earlier exchanges on my blog and yours, my views here have remained the same since before I entered into an arrangement with Mendeley, so they are my own and I’m speaking on my own behalf.

As for Mendeley (and in the spirit of openness, you should probably note that you work for Mendeley), the question has been asked but definitely has not been conclusively answered. That’s one of the problems with fair use, each case is judged on an individual basis, and you can’t know if what you’re doing is indeed fair use until it is challenged and declared to be so by a court of law. Some publishers and institutions may be interacting with Mendeley, but I assume none have signed an agreement that bans any legal action on their part against Mendeley. Even if so, there are plenty of other publishers out there and all it really will take is one lawyer looking to get a fat payout.

I was surprised when we met with Mendeley, given the involvement of last.fm, how naive they seemed toward the legal history of filesharing and the precedents that had been set. They seem to have hit on all of the major no-no’s from the Napster and Grokster cases (storing files on the company’s own servers, openly encouraging infringement, although they’ve changed the text on the latter issue after it was brought to their attention). If you started a business where people put up lists of their music collections and allowed them to share mp3′s of songs to a limited group of strangers, I’m wiling to bet the music companies wouldn’t accept it, and the same is likely here.

The good news is that Mendeley’s product is completely viable without the infringing functionality, and in many ways, they’ve got the best platform on the market for reference management. I’m a little dubious of their business model, given the number of competitors in the market and how difficult it will be to charge for any of these services, but we’ll have to see.

* Whatever value there is in social media for scientists is mostly being captured by existing networks, so there’s not much call for another network.

*The network itself isn’t the point – if the tool is valuable, a network may grow around it, as it has for most of the successful web20 properties: Flickr as a tool for sharing pictures, youtube for sharing/transcoding video, Mendeley for organizing PDFs, Linkedin for sharing contact information and hosting a profile, maybe even Twitter/Friendfeed for sharing conference notes and the like.

* Social networking is here to stay and will continue to grow, but it might be some time before the majority of scientists are using it as part of their daily workflow.

* We don’t yet have enough data to even guess at what the overall uptake of web20 tools will be among the scientific community, so if you’re interested in marketing a product which has to be used by the majority of scientists in order for it to be successful, it had better provide some value beyond online networking. On the other hand, if you’re a scientist concerned about losing your investment of time, there’s not much comfort to be had. Projects backed by large institutions can lose support (Connotea, 2collab) and small startups can go under (labspaces, other science networks).

A final note about Mendeley. The copyright infringement question has been asked and answered. Dozens of publishers and repositories support Mendeley, including ISI WOK, EBSCO, ScienceDirect, ACM, ArXiv, Wiley Interscience, etc. The top universities in the world are heavily on board with what Mendeley is doing, and they’ve got funding from seasoned veterans of established web20 companies such as Skype and last.fm. They’re not going to disappear anytime soon. Even if they did, your PDFs would still be organized and you could still use the software to create and manage citations and bibliographies in documents.