Fwd: [open-science] Fwd: Zotero [free alternative to EndNote] and Thomson-Reuters

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yishay Mor <yis...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Subject: [open-science] Fwd: Zotero [free alternative to EndNote] and
Thomson-Reuters
To: open-s...@lists.okfn.org
Cc: Doug Holton <doug....@gmail.com>, Mike Cushman <M.Cu...@lse.ac.uk>


a case of corporate powers blocking open scholarly, by simple tweeks
of interface. I wonder if there's something to be done.
e.g. can we campaign for an academic boycott of bibliographic indices
that do not provide a BibTex interface?

By the way, I personally much prefer Bibsonomy to Zotero, but that's
beside the point.

___________________________
 Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
  http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
  http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com
  +44-20-78378888 x5737



-----Original Message-----

There was discussion on this list last year on the law suit that
Thomson-Reuters were taking against George Mason Uni to try to shut down
Zotero, the F/OSS alternative to EndNote. See
http://dltj.org/article/endnote-zotero-lawsuit/ or
http://www.zotero.org/blog/offical-statement/

Yesterday I was updating my teaching presentation on the use of on-line
bibliographic resources. In the course of doing so I discovered that T-R
have re-jigged the ISI site so you it no longer presents its result in a
form readable by Zotero.

This seems to me morally, if not in law, an abuse of T-R's growing
monopolistic power over key resources essential to the academic
community and something we should regard with the deepest suspicion.

I hope that list members will make this abuse widely known.

Mike Cushman   [ mailto:m.cu...@lse.ac.uk]
Information Systems  and Innovation Group
Department of Management
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London       WC2A 2AE
Phone: +44 (0)20 7955 7426      Fax: +44 (0)20 7955 7385
http://is.lse.ac.uk/




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--
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Daniel C.]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> a case of corporate powers blocking open scholarly, by simple tweeks
> of interface. I wonder if there's something to be done.
> e.g. can we campaign for an academic boycott of bibliographic indices
> that do not provide a BibTex interface?

Has this been brought to the attention of whichever bureaucracy deals
with antitrust issues? For that matter, IS this an antitrust issue?

As far as technology goes, a little juggling of the interface isn't
(or shouldn't be!) enough to make the data unreadable. If the data is
available, it can be parsed, munged, mashed or mangled into a format
that Zotero can use. This almost always leads to an arms race type
scenario between the two parties, and as we learned from Sun Tzu, no
nation benefits from a protracted war. But it's possible, even if
it's not a good idea.

-Dan C.

[Mr. Gunn]

In case anyone is interested, (Bryan and I have talked about this a
little before) there's a group trying to do an end-run around Thompson-
Reuters by compiling their own stats. Mendeley (http://mendeley.com)
is a reference management software that works for PDFs kinda like
last.fm does for MP3s. What they're doing is compiling "most read"
stats by analyzing someone's collection of PDFs. They have a
bookmarklet also, so they are vulnerable to T-R's shenanigans that
way, but T-R can't garble the PDFs the person downloads. ;-)

William Gunn
http://synthesis.williamgunn.org
http://twitter.com/mrgunn

On May 14, 2:01 am, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Yishay Mor <yish...@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:26 AM
> Subject: [open-science] Fwd: Zotero [free alternative to EndNote] and
> Thomson-Reuters
> To: open-scie...@lists.okfn.org
> Cc: Doug Holton <doug.hol...@gmail.com>, Mike Cushman <M.Cush...@lse.ac.uk>
>
> a case of corporate powers blocking open scholarly, by simple tweeks
> of interface. I wonder if there's something to be done.
> e.g. can we campaign for an academic boycott of bibliographic indices
> that do not provide a BibTex interface?
>
> By the way, I personally much prefer Bibsonomy to Zotero, but that's
> beside the point.
>
> ___________________________
>  Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
>  http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
>  http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com
>   +44-20-78378888 x5737
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> There was discussion on this list last year on the law suit that
> Thomson-Reuters were taking against George Mason Uni to try to shut down

> Zotero, the F/OSS alternative to EndNote. Seehttp://dltj.org/article/endnote-zotero-lawsuit/orhttp://www.zotero.org/blog/offical-statement/

>
> Yesterday I was updating my teaching presentation on the use of on-line
> bibliographic resources. In the course of doing so I discovered that T-R
> have re-jigged the ISI site so you it no longer presents its result in a
> form readable by Zotero.
>
> This seems to me morally, if not in law, an abuse of T-R's growing
> monopolistic power over key resources essential to the academic
> community and something we should regard with the deepest suspicion.
>
> I hope that list members will make this abuse widely known.
>

> Mike Cushman   [ mailto:m.cush...@lse.ac.uk]

> Information Systems  and Innovation Group
> Department of Management
> London School of Economics and Political Science
> Houghton Street
> London       WC2A 2AE

> Phone: +44 (0)20 7955 7426      Fax: +44 (0)20 7955 7385http://is.lse.ac.uk/
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-science mailing list
> open-scie...@lists.okfn.orghttp://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-science
>
> --
> - Bryanhttp://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507

[Bryan Bishop]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Mr. Gunn wrote:
> In case anyone is interested, (Bryan and I have talked about this a
> little before) there's a group trying to do an end-run around Thompson-
> Reuters by compiling their own stats.  Mendeley (http://mendeley.com)
> is a reference management software that works for PDFs kinda like
> last.fm does for MP3s.  What they're doing is compiling "most read"
> stats by analyzing someone's collection of PDFs. They have a
> bookmarklet also, so they are vulnerable to T-R's shenanigans that
> way, but T-R can't garble the PDFs the person downloads. ;-)

I played with Mendeley for a while, and for various reasons I have now
stopped- first, it's not open source (so I can't fix it), secondly
however they are interpreting uninterpretable PDFs needs improvement
(which I can't provide, even though I can), and thirdly it seems to
crash for collections of over 1,000 papers. But I am wondering about
this stat-collecting that you mention. When I explored their website,
the stats seemed to be somewhat hidden, and really they only wanted
you to see *your* stats, not those of everyone else, or stats for
individual papers related to everyone else's collections, etc. Has
this changed since I last checked?

- Bryan

[Ricardo Vidal]

Hi Bryan,

Sorry to hear you've stopped using Mendeley. You mentioned that you
found something broken that you couldn't fix due to the fact it's not
open source. I'm sure the team of engineers putting the software
together would love to hear your thoughts and fix things asap!

I'm not sure about the 1000 papers bug you mentioned but I would
imagine it take a little while to go through all those papers and all
the references inside them. Remember Mendeley goes through the
metadata, fulltext, etc.

As regards to the stats, we recognize that they are a bit difficult to
find but within the next two weeks or so, more prominent stats at the
article-level will be available. As for user stats, it's a bit more
complicated as you may understand but there may be an opt-in later on
for those willing to share their personal stats. Short version: More
stats to come, soon. :)

Anyhow, hope you give Mendeley another chance.

Cheers,
Ricardo

> - Bryanhttp://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Ricardo Vidal <rvi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to hear you've stopped using Mendeley. You mentioned that you
> found something broken that you couldn't fix due to the fact it's not
> open source. I'm sure the team of engineers putting the software
> together would love to hear your thoughts and fix things asap!

Last time I did that they ignored me, as you well know. Whether an
application goes through one or one hundred thousand items should not
be a cause for system failure- that's something that batch programming
has solved for decades.

- Bryan

[Ricardo Vidal]

Hey Bryan,

Sorry to hear you didn't get a reply. I'll see what can be done. As
regards to the batch indexing, I'll also forward your thoughts.

R

> - Bryanhttp://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507