Goodbye Mendeley

So I haven't written on this blog for more than a year. I won't make a habit of writing about work here. It's a personal thing, it has nothing to do with work. I'll make an exception this time though.

Based on rumors of an Elsevier takeover I started migrating my reference indexes from Mendeley to Zotero a while ago. Now that it has actually happened, I'm partly glad my time spent wasn't wasted. It is also somewhat sad to think the figurative cancer of academic research can use money to take over something as idealistic as Mendeley.

I think it's pretty clear from my post history on ResearchGate that I don't like Elsevier at all. For computer science, they're really not what they are (or at least seem to be) for other fields. Unfortunately, as a researcher you're stuck with where other people publish their work, so you do need access to the papers. But that's all I do with them. I try to avoid citing Elsevier papers, and I wouldn't submit or review a paper there. Thus it seems fitting I also don't use Mendeley.

Anyway, from a paper management point of view, "nothing of value was lost", as the internet says. Zotero is fantastic. So thank you, Elsevier, for making my life easier by forcing change upon me.