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.