| Let me try to explain. Mendeley and Zotero basically do the same thing, which is categorizing literature - specifically research papers. Mendeley offers a built-in PDF viewer with annotations tools, Zotero relies on external viewers for that.
Both offer cloud storage. Researchers usually have to categorize and scan over huge amount of prior literature. If you are working on a project, you usually want to have a good library or folder structure detailing relevant literature. When writing your paper, you also want to be able to cite from this library quickly, via BibTex for example. Researchers maintain a personal library with literature they read, plan to read or have cited. When researchers collaborate, they need to merge these libraries. Since tools differ, the lowest common demoninator is often a dropbox somewhere. Sometimes everyone works on Zotero or Mendeley, such that files can be shared within the system. Usually not. Mendeley and Zotero used to be equally open to sharing and collaborating. Mendeley was in a sense superior as it was polished, had great tools to annotate and great tools to work with Meta-data.
Zotero, while FOSS, was always behind. Then, Mendeley was bought by Elsevier, the largest publisher. Elsevier does not want people to share PDFs, because Elsevier wants everyone to pay for the priviledge to download those pdfs. Thus, Mendeley started to make it more and more difficult to collaborate. Now it is even difficult to share files within the Mendeley eco-system! Perhaps you are using Calibre for you Ebooks. Now imagine Calibre would deactivate any way for you to view, send, export or use your files (the files that YOU put into it) outside of the Calibre Ebook viewer, and it would encrypt its database so that you would not even try.
That's what happened. Sharing research is the lifeblood of science, and Elsevier wants to destroy it. Elsevier has done many other things that has harmed scientific progress - the majority of this undertaking you fund with you tax dollars! The way this is done is almost comically blatant.
Elsevier acts like a comicbook villain. They are literally evil. |