After years of saga, next week -- September 1, 2022 -- Mendeley and Elsevier will CEASE TO ALLOW download of Mendeley Desktop -- a far better product, in the opinion of a substantial number of scholars. Aside from a better overall UX design, a crucial detail is that Mendeley Desktop puts your database (including your annotations) on YOUR computer. The "new and improved" Mendeley Reference Manager keeps your database on THEIR servers. Your access rights to your own property are therefore under threat. They don't willingly give you your files and notes in a clean, open, easy to manipulate format. Why not? They may say it's for the user's good, but it's really because they're petrified at losing more customers to Zotero, Endnote, and other competitors. If they make it as easy to do as it should be, they'll lose tens of thousands of users.
And how convenient that they have long obscured the difference between the two, and hidden Mendeley Desktop from sight (see attachment). After all, they would prefer we not have access to our own data, and their UX people don't seem to understand basic usability concepts. I was in contact with them for several years about these problems, and though they were civil they were almost entirely nonresponsive, not even repairing a list of bugs that I'd pointed out. I and other users also had to threaten to sue Elsevier and only then did we get our data.
See attached. Even if you do manage to click on the proper Download Desktop link, it promotes ”Reference Manager 'for' Desktop", and in small type below it says "You can still download Mendeley Desktop." This is deliberate obscurancy -- of a class that only smarmy advertising companies engage in. It's so blatant that I had to look twice, I couldn't believe my eyes.
I'd welcome any or all of the following:
- comments
- a class-action suit by scholars
- a mass downloads and sharing of Desktop 1.19.8 or, in the alternative, an exodus from Mendeley
- responses from Olivier Dumon and the staff of Elsevier
- putting Desktop 1.19.8 on publicly accessible download sites, although you can believe such people will be aggressively harassed by Elsevier; and yet I'm considering doing it myself [can I legally even welcome this?]
I'd be very surprised if Elsevier were not to pressure ResearchGate to take down this discussion topic.
The current offending links, so you can see and collect the evidence yourself:
#mendeley #zotero #endnote #willitfloat