Sure, it’s a pain, but fixing up the Bib is not the point. The point is finding what you need when you need it. Focus more on organizing your material with respect to content and use, and less on formatting the bib on the paper you finally produce. If your software does it automatically, nice. If not, just do it yourself. Stop whinging about it.

Let’s remember that citation style managers are essentially a hack to support all the unnecessarily different formats required by different publishers. They’re essentially a idiom of print that has been shoveled into the digital world but when documents are rendered from a underlying database as opposed to printed using ink on paper, they can do the formatting at the time of rendering, not the time of writing. Offloading this effort would the allow academics to focus on the actual writing, not the fussy little details of what format things should be in.

The other exciting thing about all the activity in this space is that it sharpens the focus on open access. All these tools work better for their users when there’s more OA content available.

I also get the resistance to using browser plugins for such a crucial piece of software. Others may be interested to know that Zotero has just announced (like, yesterday) that they are developing a stand-alone version of their product (http://www.zotero.org/blog/standalone-zotero/).

Personally, I think charging for expanded space is an excellent business model (assuming you are not more expensive than existing cloud services). Collaborative tools .. that depends. Facebook is free (but uses ads). Whatever you do, somebody will figure out a way of doing it for free, most likely on facebook. You might as well go for an ad-based collaboration environment!

(in my humble uninformed opinion)

it’s Victor, one of the founders of Mendeley. Simon’s point is partially correct in that not everything that Mendeley offers in the future will be a free of charge (likewise, Zotero also charges for additional storage space). At some point in the near future, we’ll start offering additional features/services that users can purchase for a monthly fee, e.g. expanded storage space or advanced collaboration features. However, any features of Mendeley that are free will always remain free.

Karen: Indeed, our Word/OpenOffice Plugins contain code licensed by Zotero under the ECL. Our plugins are likewise open source under the ECL. Besides, we are developing an open-source WYSIWYG Citation Style Editor which will most likely be hosted at http://www.citationstyles.org. It’s still very much work in progress, but you can access the code here: http://bitbucket.org/csledit/csl-wysiwyg-editor/ or play around with the status quo here: http://csleditor.quist.de/csleditor/show/1/example-citation-style (the UI will be overhauled completely before it’s finished).

All the best,
Victor

I like the author’s logic on not wanting to change research software frequently, but I don’t know that I would bet Mandelay will last longer than Firefox, on part due to Firefox’s large and vibrant open source community, and partly because it’s not yet clear that Mandelay has a workable business model. How long can their funding hold out?

Also, Zotero is a Firefox extention. In the past I’ve chosen my reference managing software very carefully. I have 10,000 print papers and another 20,000 references I regularly search through. I have changed my system from dBase to Access to Endnote to Chaos to Mendely over 30 years.

In other words, the lifespan of my mission-critical reference management exceds that of the average popular browser, and certainly of the average browser plugin.

Plus, I HATE browser plugins. So that’s why I did not even try Zotero. Though it looks interesting.