Comments on: Josh Greenberg, Zotero, and Scholarship 2.0 (!! Beta! Zap! Pow!)

By: Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:11:54 +0000

Mendeley isn’t a pure webservice like Connotea or Citeulike, but it has webservice features, a bookmarket, online access to your library and such.

More to nojhan’s point, all the material in the Mendeley research catalog http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/ is licensed with a CC-BY license to ensure maximal reuse: http://dev.mendeley.com/docs/license

By: Sage

Sage — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:28:00 +0000

From what Josh described, they probably won’t be releasing their database as a whole, but they will be offering an API that allows people to use pretty much everything but the private information. In other words, I think they realize the desirability of free data as well as free software. It may not be on the website, but the developers are definitely talking about these issues.

The plan for Zotero is to “leverage solipsism” as Josh explained it, to create a basic program and service that useful enough on its own to eat up part of the EndNote market and create a strong userbase, and by the time the social features and content aspects come online, they will already be close to the critical mass it would take to make it worthwhile.

By: nojhan

nojhan — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:18:00 +0000

Such webservices already exists, with Connotea or CiteULike.

One of the recurring claim with such services is that the software is (or should be) open source. For instance, Connotea is open-source, but not CiteULike.

But I find harmfull that there is only a few discussions around the availability of the content itself.

Wikipedia shows that the true issue is the licence of the data. The software used to present this data is important too, but secondary. Here, Zotero does not seems to measure the crucial need of a free content (well, on their web site).

The two competitors are not planning to freeing their data: Connotea does not give access to its whole database, CiteULike does, but on demand and it retains all the rights.

In my opinion, Zotero could tell apart by releasing their database under an open-source license. Just look at Wikipedia, and learn from its experience.