It's not so much the lock-in issue, or the migration issue for me.
I can pay for a good service, Mendeley used to be that, cause this is my job.
The issue is that due to Elsevier, a DRM logic was implemented that just doesn't make sense for scientists. The idea is that I can tell you about a paper, but you have to download it yourself because I can not send it to you. I can annotate the PDF, but I can not send you the annotated PDF. We have to look at the same screen to see what I wrote.
That end result means that Mendeley is no longer a good product. It makes scientific collaboration difficult to impossible. Sharing of files, ideas, results and writing is such a basic thing in todays world, that you should really be surprised how a company would think that this is a good idea, especially for scientists who almost always collaborate in loose teams.
But that is was happened, because Elsevier only makes money if the only place you can get any PDFs is their DRM walled garden.
So Mendeley is now bad. And NOW it matters that you can not get your data out of it.
And the thing is, these annotations and folder categories, tags and meta-data - that's all specific to one researcher. It can not be replicated. It could be years of work in that database, and Mendeley holds it hostage.
The issue is that due to Elsevier, a DRM logic was implemented that just doesn't make sense for scientists. The idea is that I can tell you about a paper, but you have to download it yourself because I can not send it to you. I can annotate the PDF, but I can not send you the annotated PDF. We have to look at the same screen to see what I wrote.
That end result means that Mendeley is no longer a good product. It makes scientific collaboration difficult to impossible. Sharing of files, ideas, results and writing is such a basic thing in todays world, that you should really be surprised how a company would think that this is a good idea, especially for scientists who almost always collaborate in loose teams.
But that is was happened, because Elsevier only makes money if the only place you can get any PDFs is their DRM walled garden.
So Mendeley is now bad. And NOW it matters that you can not get your data out of it. And the thing is, these annotations and folder categories, tags and meta-data - that's all specific to one researcher. It can not be replicated. It could be years of work in that database, and Mendeley holds it hostage.