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\begin{document}

\title{Business Strategy and Openness}



\author[1]{John Wilbanks}%
\affil[1]{DEL-FI}%


\vspace{-1em}



  
  \date{May 28, 2024}


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I got a lot of good responses to my post yesterday about Mendeley's
acquisition by Elsevier.

But a theme emerged that I didn't intend to emerge, which was the idea
that because I pegged Mendeley's investment in open access as a customer
acquisition strategy that it made it insincere.

That was most definitely not the point.

Remember that half the time I'm a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at
the Kauffman Foundation. We study startups and support entrepreneurs. I
can tell you that using openness as a customer acquisition strategy is
something I think is a smart move, especially the way that Mendeley did
it.

As a quick reminder for those who've never started a company, they need
to acquire customers or they go out of business (as mine did, because
mine didn't). If you don't have a strategy to do that, you'll fail.

By selecting open, and fully committing to it, as a strategy, Mendeley
helped the Open Access world enormously over the past four years. What
they've done creates a solid track record in OA, a serious and provable
one. They didn't do this for evil reasons, or in anything close to an
insincere way. And by doing it they advanced the movement. We can, and
should, thank them. That's why the anger stunned me, as I mentioned
yesterday.

They hired a community manager (William Gunn) personally and
professionally dedicated to OA, and let him run. I know, respect, and
believe deeply in William and his commitment. That's not an insincere
company move.

Their data's under CC-BY. That's not insincere. I made a crack about
allowing the database to be downloaded and reposted, and immediately
heard back from William that I could go for it. That's not insincere.

They ran the binary battle with PLoS (I was a judge!). That's not
insincere.

They backed the Access2Research petition, immediately. That's not
insincere.

My point wasn't to gleefully give Mendeley the finger and say, you were
closed all along, or to say, you were just using us to get customers.
Every startup needs customers, and if you don't realize that you're kind
of being a dick to the people in the startup. Mendeley's making a
meaningful commitment to open as a customer acquisition strategy was
innovative, and important, and advanced the cause of open access to the
scholarly literature.

My point was deeper. It was that because the openness was not tied to
revenue, it could be removed now that the product didn't need an
innovative customer acquisition strategy. It's tied to a massive
customer base now. Open can be discarded. When it's part of the revenue
model, it can't be discarded nearly as easily.

And in my experience, if open *can* be discarded, it usually *is*
discarded when monetization becomes the priority. I hope that I'm wrong.\selectlanguage{english}
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