Your assumption is that now Mendeley is going to suddenly shed it's sheep's clothing and reveal itself to be a wolf. As a Mendeley employee (and a scientist, not a PR person), you may not believe me or you may think I'm just naive but I think you will have to wait and see.

Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.

All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?

No, they're leaving: http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-o...

Choice quote: "For that reason then I co-founded PeerJ, an Open Access journal, with one aim of never being in the position to take shit ever again from a closed publisher."

They are not leaving. This one person left, a while ago. Correlation or causation, I can't speak for him.

Maye this person that left knew something like this would happen. The timing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that the ones thst stay are linked to a publisher that has no morals, no ethics.

This week? No. One, two, or more years down the road? We shall see.

I'm not 100% behind the Mendeley hate right now, but they're against all odds. While everything I've heard from the team so far, including on the prominent HN threads, has been reassuring and positive, it's still just words.

People are making predictions about the future right now, and no words will be able to sway public opinion. Only action, and time. It seems Mendeley (or, as of now, Elsevier) are betting on the latter, because there has been no action, only PR.

The same PR team that is flooding social media with the usual spiel will be given maybe a 6-month 1-year contract and will be gone soon.

All these employees, including the CEO, are no longer in control anymore; the owner, Elsevier, is in control and is not an impartial 'financial investor' but an 'strategic investor' with a larger stake in the industry than the whole of Mendeley.

It means that a week ago CEO could make the same promises and be heard seriously, but the same CEO promises right now are not worth the paper they're not written on.

Now at any point in the future all the Mendeley 'openness' promises can be easily broken by Elsevier, so they either know that all the promises they're making now are empty (i.e., lying intentionally) or they don't know that (then they're naive and incompetent as general managers).

Promises can be made by those in control. Leaders in public companies can be considered in control. Leaders in privately held companies can be considered in control if their public vision and roadmap is aligned with the owner. But if the owner has a clear interest to change the roadmap - then it would be imprudent to rely on such a roadmap. Elsevier has a reputation of intentionally sabotaging projects (say, gov't initiatives) that should bring openness - if they fool you twice, shame on you.

No, they turned into useful idiots.

No, but with gradual attrition due to fundamental disagreements with the new management, I imagine the character of the company will change significantly within the year, if not sooner.

No, they just became employees of a corporation that use unethical tactics in publishing. You end up guilty by association.

PR is irrelevant to "open". Either the product is or isn't. Academics should be smart enough is it isn't.

Academics usually like shiny things, specially free. And Mendeley didn't target the old school ones, they targeted students, post-docs, usually the trend-setters in the academic environment. Professors and Senior Researchers are too busy or don't have time to check these things, and they end up using what other people use in their labs.

And for broke, internet saavy students, free stuff with a promise of a new groundbreaking trend in science was enough to lure them.