According to this tech-crunch article, there are strong suggestions that the citation manager, Mendeley (which we’ve blogged about here), could soon be sold to Elsevier. Given Elsevier’s reputation as a leading opponent of open access (as is evident, for example, from this past year’s boycott), the deal raises major questions about the future of Mendeley’s position at the cutting edge of academic software. Much of what made Mendeley such a great tool was its ability to transcend the intellectual property issues that constrain traditional databases by crowd-sourcing information about resources from a large, self-organized body of scholars. This, in part, has led the open access community to embrace Mendeley, a fact that will make Mendeley and Elsevier, at the very least, strange bedfellows. This article, also from tech-crunch, suggests the sale could be a boon for Mendeley users since Elsevier has made a public attempt to embrace open access and has the resources to keep Mendeley afloat. If Elsevier is successful in its acquisition of Mendeley, and is serious about adopting its values, that would signify a shift in the status quo of the scholarly publishing industry. Otherwise, there may be significant changes in store for Mendeley.
We’ll be following the story as it develops, so stay tuned…