Since making this change, Elsevier has released its replacement for Mendeley Desktop, Mendeley Reference Manager, which is essentially a wrapper around the website and doesn’t contain a real local database at all. The API is under Elsevier’s control and can be changed or discontinued at any time. Mendeley offers a web-based API, but it contains only uploaded data, so relying on it means that anyone wanting to export their own data first needs to upload all their data and files to Elsevier’s servers.
The export formats supported by Mendeley don’t contain folders, various metadata fields (date added, favorite, and others), or PDF annotations. Elsevier later stated that the change was required by new European privacy regulations - a bizarre claim, given that those regulations are designed to give people control over their data and guarantee data portability, not the opposite - and continued to assert, falsely, that full local export was still possible, while repeatedly dismissing reports of the change as “#fakenews”.ĭirect access to the Mendeley database is the only local way to export the full contents of one’s own research.
The Mendeley 1.19 release notes claimed that the encryption was for “improved security” on shared machines, yet applications rarely encrypt their local data files, as file protections are generally handled by the operating system with account permissions and full-disk encryption, and anyone using the same operating system account or an admin account can already install a keylogger to capture passwords. Until recently, Mendeley Desktop imported data from Zotero’s own open database, as it had since 2009. Elsevier made this change a few months after Zotero publicly announced work on an importer, despite having long touted the openness of its database format as a guarantee against lock-in and explaining in its documentation that the database could be accessed using standard tools.
To learn how to install the Web Importer, visit Mendeleys blog post on the subject: Interested in giving us feedback on this new feature? We'd love to hear it - tweet to let us know what you think.Starting in Mendeley Desktop 1.19, Elsevier began encrypting the local Mendeley database, making it unreadable by Zotero and other standard database tools. This development follows the successful integration of the Web Importer with ScienceDirect which was announced in September on Mendeley's blog. The Web Importer retrieves all relevant metadata for the documents being viewed. Scopus subscribers who are also Mendeley users can now import up to 200 documents at a time to their Mendeley Library via Scopus. Our hope is that the combination of the Mendeley Web Importer with Scopus will help accomplish this goal, facilitating scientific discovery and maximizing productivity for researchers. Importing documents and metadata from the web is a key part of a researcher's workflow and should be as smooth and intuitive as the search process. Startups don’t get bought by big companies to blow up the core. Elsevier has a long track record with no indication of change. This does not make me more hopeful of Elsevier this makes me even more dubious of Mendeley. As part of our ongoing efforts to integrate more closely with Mendeley, we're happy to officially announce that as of last week Scopus supports the "Save to Mendeley" Web Importer. In Mendeley’s post, they indicate overlap in their vision and Elsevier’s vision as a company.