"Elsevier tried to sneak in legislation through lobbying – the so-called Research Works Act – that was to undo the National Institute of Health’s Open Access mandate and therefore would have prevented public access to millions of bio-medical research papers. They had to pull back after outrage and boycotts from the academic community.

Our vision is to crack this open by, first of all, encouraging academics to be aware of their rights, be aware of the lobbying that is going on, and also by enabling them to post their own publications over which they retain copyright, from their Mendeley profiles. A ton of papers have been made available by Mendeley in this way, by academics uploading their own papers. So, that’s our attempt at making content more accessible and science more open."

Quoted from the founder in an interview just a few months ago (17 September 2012). Speaks for itself really.

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/qa/3322/cracking-open-scie...

It does speak for itself, in that Victor and many other Mendeley staff stand by their opposition to the Research Works Act. We believe that the SOPA blackout protests (which we participated in), and the Cost of Knowledge boycott have led Elsevier to start addressing the issues people have had with them. Some things will be quick to change, others more slowly.

The morals of our staff haven't changed overnight, and we'll continue to try and push Elsevier towards a future with a greater emphasis on open science. There's no contradiction here, just a huge challenge on our part.

(Full disclosure, I'm a designer at Mendeley)

Thanks for digging it out. Upvoted!