This is literally the worst thing you can do. Even a tenured professor doesn't seem to stay in the same institution for their lifetime nowadays so why would you go to a service that even you personally cannot pay for yourself (reasonably)?
Apart from it being domain specific (according to wikipedia) it is also not open source, so recommending this as a reaction to the Mendeley news is... words fail me... :|
What do you mean "domain specific"? Personal subscription is also available. And of the popular online reference managers, I don't think open source by itself certify anything related to the core functions of a reference manager. In my opinion, the really established open source ref manager is BibTeX, however, its user base is quite limited even inside academy to specific fields.
> It includes a Word plug-in, from which you're able to directly search PubMed [...]
That sounds like it's at least focusing on medicine as a field (and generally fields in which Word documents are an acceptable means of dissemination...)
Regarding open source:
Being open source is certainly not core to the functionality of a reference manager. But it does protect you from exactly the kind of behaviour shown by Mendeley here. So recommending a "solution" for the situation that has exactly the same drawback as the Mendeley (i.e. vendor lock-in) is short-sighted in the extreme.
I gave this a try, but sadly it came up short. For writing a single paper of MSc Thesis, it might work. However it just doesn't seem suited for handling a large number of references for a variety of projects, which get called on frequently as standard references in papers, reference material, and much more.
If it helps I have just under 2000 papers in my Zotero. It isn't massive by research standards, but it is substantial.
Try to group into different projects in F1000. One thing I still don't like about F1000 is the reference manager need to go online for entries, so it kind of slow on first call. By the way, i don't how you cite when writing, but for me, I mostly handle that part after I finish the writing. At the places citations needed in the manuscript, I often just put a mark saying #somebody's paper on somethin#, and then do the job all the once. There always some really prolific guys make the citation search taking too much time to break to flow.