(cross-posted from https://blog.cosmik.network/mendeley-story)
I've been telling the story of Mendeley at events for the last year, but never got around to writing it down. I found that while a lot of people are familiar with Mendeley, most are not familiar with the back story. The Mendeley story is emblematic of the dysfunctionality of the publishing system and the ways researchers are screwed over by extractive publishers, but it also contains the clues for a promising path forward. The story of Mendeley shines a light on the hidden value of the digital footprints left by researchers; a multi-billion dollar asset we collectively generate but don't control. Those digital footprints, and who controls them, are a key piece of the sustainability puzzle for research commons, which is why I think this story deserves to be much more widely known.
I first learned about the Mendeley story back in 2022 by asking a simple question that turned out to be a rabbit hole: why don’t we have something like Goodreads for science? I asked this back in 2022, but the question is still very much with me, and it keeps coming up with others as well; just last year, Sanje Horah posted this tweet:
Which I keep referencing, since it is so striking how much the idea still resonates with people: 8.4M views and thousands of likes and shares.
So why don’t we have something like Goodreads for science? TL;DR - we did. Mendeley was one of the first. Its story is representative, and roughly tracks the web’s evolutionary stages (e.g., web 1.0 → 2.0 → 3.0). Mendeley was a cool new “web 1.0” science goodreads, until it got eaten by Elsevier, a data-hungry publishing behemoth (Web 2.0). Web 3.0 is where we're at today: the decentralized dreams of the past few years mostly fizzled, but emerging cooperative federations and open social protocols are laying the groundwork for research commons that can't be acquired and dismantled the way Mendeley was.
That’s the TL;DR, but the details are worth diving into.
Web 1.0 - the good ol’ days
The basic facts of Mendeley’s story are available on Wikipedia. It was founded in 2007 by 3 German PhD students, Paul Foeckler, Victor Henning, and Jan Reichelt. Mendeley is a reference manager software used to manage, annotate and share research papers and to generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.
This may not seem particularly exciting, but by 2009 Mendeley had incorporated more advanced features such as personalized content recommendation and social networking. The Guardian ranked it #6 in "Top 100 tech media companies", and it won a European Start-up of the Startup of the Year award in 2009:
“[Mendeley] describe themselves as the ‘Last.fm for research’. the startup essentially aims to enable academics to manage and share their research paper inventory and at the same time discover like-minded people and papers thanks to a recommendation and matching algorithm.”
So way back in 2009 we already had quite a popular Goodreads for science in the form of Mendeley.
Web 2.0 - When The Rebel Alliance Sells Out
The next chapter of Mendeley’s story is well told by a 2013 New Yorker piece by David Dobbs titled “When the Rebel Alliance Sells Out”. Mendeley “had become a sort of rebel-scientist icon for producing a software-and-paper-sharing service that threatened to disrupt scholarly publishing in the way that Napster and last.fm had disrupted the music industry a few years earlier.”
And more:
“Simply by searching, finding, reading, and sharing papers on Mendeley, researchers could rebel both personally and politically: they could enjoy the frisson of obtaining a paywalled paper without paying for it. And by unbundling the paper from the journal, as last.fm had let music fans unbundle songs from albums, they felt like they were kicking a brick out of the outmoded publishing infrastructure.”
But “as users became happier, publishers grew grumpier and investors less patient.” By the end of the summer of 2011, “Mendeley had over a million users who had uploaded over sixty million papers—the world’s single biggest repository of academic papers—and were sharing many of them.” The company was demonstrating a lot of potential, but it needed to start generating big profits to appease its investors. Mendeley needed an exit plan.
These conditions made Mendeley an attractive target for Elsevier, a publishing behemoth “infamous for restricting the flow of scientific information so it can sell research papers for as much as fifty dollars a piece, generating profit margins of thirty-six per cent and netting the company billions of dollars in revenue annually.”
In 2013 Elseveier acquired Mendeley for around $65 million. Elsevier, Dobbs writes, had two main reasons for purchasing Mendeley:
“One is to squash it—to destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model. Many critics fear that’s the case. The other reason is to possess the aggregated data that Mendeley’s users generate with all of their searching and sharing...Their use patterns reveal who is reading what, which papers are popular, what lines of research are surging, which disciplines and journals are crucial, and a lot of other extremely valuable information.”
After the acquisition, some still maintained hope “Mendeley would use their Elsevier backing to do something really fantastic”. Unfortunately, this was not to be, and instead Mendeley followed the well-trodden path of startups that have a “successful” exit for founders but end up “dying in the bosom of a larger company”.
For Elsevier, on the other hand, the acquisition of Mendeley was part of a broader transformation from a publisher into a data analytics company. Elsevier and other publishers recognized that the open access movement in science threatened their traditional closed access business model. They astutely realized that, in a world with open access to infinite information, the next big thing would be the data analytics tools needed to make sense of it all. By the late 2010s, publishers had transitioned into data analytics companies. Today, Elsevier no longer calls itself a publisher- they are providers of “advanced information and decision support to accelerate progress in science and healthcare worldwide.”
Jefferson Pooley, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, calls this new business “surveillance publishing,” highlighting the similarities with Shoshana Zuboff’s characterization of big tech platforms’ “surveillance capitalism” business model: “Elsevier and its peers are layering a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations, fueled by data extraction. They are packaging researcher behavior, gleaned from their digital platforms, into prediction products, which they sell back to universities and other clients.“
PlumX, an analytics company also acquired by Elsevier, lists Mendeley data under the “Captures” metric that measures how many times users bookmarked or saved research content. Interestingly, they note that captures specifically “can be a leading indicator of future citations” - hence the value of acquiring the data.
They note that:
“Technologies that encourage communication, sharing and other interaction with research output—leave “footprints” to show the way back to who is interested in the research and why.”
In business terms, data analytics translates into a lot of money: data from Mendeley, PlumX and other products fuels Elsevier’s “Databases and Tools” segment which now generates almost half their 3B GBP yearly revenue (2024).
Not bad for a $65M purchase back in 2013.
Web 3.0: when the Rebel Alliance strikes back?
Fast forward to today. We still don’t have Science Goodreads, but we’re starting to rebuild it, with Semble and a constellation of interoperating open social apps for research.
And this time around we have a unique window of opportunity to do it right:
Researchers are beyond tired of the publishing system and extractive practices around AI are accelerating the system to its breaking point.
(source: https://x.com/RuthieClems/status/1813478033975623697)
We have open social networks used by millions of researchers where meaningful data sovereignty is built in - this time around we can own our footprints with ActivityPub and ATProto - Semble and Margin for annotations, Bluesky for microblogging, Open Science Network for community discussion spaces, and so on.
The stakes around those footprints are rising fast. Big AI companies are racing to capture behavioral data through browsers and research tools: OpenAI launched its own browser (ChatGPT Atlas) and research workspace (Prism) precisely because, as the post below observes, "full browser integration is by far the best way to get the data." What Elsevier figured out with Mendeley, big AI is now scaling up.
(source: https://x.com/herbiebradley/status/198072569386967473)
On the rebels’ side, open social combined with AI-powered coding are dramatically lowering the barriers for creating scalable research infrastructure. In the ATProto ecosystem for example, researchers with minimal web development experience but great ideas are creating new social media clients tailored for researchers and even whole new preprint publishing services:
Emerging cooperative federation models offer a novel path beyond the familiar options of commercial platforms, government mandates, or dependence on philanthropic funding. Drawing on evolving notions of commons as self-reliant and self-organizing collectives, initiatives like CAIROS are building research infrastructure that is designed to resist extraction from the start, for example through democratic governance and new forms of equitable data stewardship like data cooperatives.
Imagine what could be possible if we had researcher-stewarded ecosystems capable of generating even a fraction of the billion-dollar revenues extracted by platforms like Elsevier, but with that value reinvested back into the people and communities that created it. That's the vision we're building towards: not another startup that needs to find its exit, but a cooperative, self-sustaining commons that belongs to researchers, by design and by governance. This time, the Rebel Alliance won't need to sell out.