So Mendeley got bought by Elsevier. And there was much teeth-gnashing. I won’t link to it but it spawned two solid hashtags: #mendelsevier and #mendelete.

I have a Mendeley account, but never used it other than to test the system against Zotero, which is what  I use to track my own work. So I am not affected by this but I’ve been a bit stunned by the depth of the anger against Mendeley. I’ve waited to write this to try and understand it.

Part of it, I assume, is just Elsevier rage. Danah Boyd has summarized why Elsevier is rage-worthy nicely in her post on the acquisition.

But the greater part feels like the anger over what many seem to think is a broken promise made by Mendeley to be an “open” company.

I don’t feel that way. I never thought Mendeley was an open company. I thought they were deploying a strategic approach to openness by exposing their data under CC-BY, but I always thought that openness wasn’t the point of the company. It’s why I didn’t use the product and why I wasn’t surprised, shocked, or saddened by the acquisition.

It’s got me thinking though about companies and “open” - and what matters in deciding whether or not to use a product from a company claiming that mantle. For me it boils down to where the openness lives in a company.

There’s a lot of ways to slice this, but a simple one would be: is the “open” part of the revenue model or is it part of the market acquisition strategy? If the former, like BioMed Central, I have a lot more faith that an acquisition will not destroy the openness, because “open” is part of the way that the company makes money.

But the open access part of Mendeley to me always appeared to be a customer acquisition strategy. It appealed to the OA folks, it appealed to developers, and it never affected any monetization or revenues. There were always visible choices by management to hedge their open bets, as Jason Hoyt has laid out. And that makes it a risky bet to think they’ll stick with it now that they have access to a massively larger customer base while inside a company with traditional antipathy towards openness.

Again, I’m not mad. I either avoid, from a professional basis, companies built on closure, or I mitigate my expectations of them and do a lot of backing up. Because at some point unless the revenues come from open, the customer acquisition strategy of openness will be deprecated. If it isn’t, then the management of the company will be replaced with managers who are willing to shut things down to make money.

Always, always, always examine claims made by companies about openness. I’m not the world’s biggest Evgeny Morozov supporter, but he’s right to examine the way that the words “open” and “sharing” and “free” get co-opted. Facebook lets you share! It’s free, and always will be!

Look the gift horse in the mouth. And if the revenue model of a startup isn’t built on open, then feel free to use the tool. But don’t get emotionally invested, or dependent, no matter how seductive the rhetoric may be. Because at some point your use and attention and content will be monetized, probably in a way that bothers you.