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Mendeley is (mainly) a proprietary social network to share basic citation data and research papers. see also

Who knows an free and open source substitute for this service?

Technically users collect BibTeX data and a hash and share this information. It would be very useful to have such a free service because every journal provides the citation data in a different format. That includes false field entries, broken files and hidden download buttons on the website.

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You might find some options here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… – Scott H. Nov 12 '12 at 19:44
Nice link. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connotea could be a solution. – Jonas Stein Nov 13 '12 at 1:36
Related (but not a duplicate): academia.stackexchange.com/q/854/1033 – gerrit Nov 20 '12 at 15:41
related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36/… – matth Nov 27 '12 at 12:23
The opening sentence could be controversial, as much as it is secondary to the context. Maybe you could rephrase it. – Kris Nov 28 '12 at 6:18

migrated from tex.stackexchange.com Nov 20 '12 at 15:13

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

I really liked Mendeley's potential but got frustrated with both their pricing model (maybe I just never learned how to use the software correctly) and it consistently butchering imported BibTeX entries.

I've been a pretty happy BibDesk user for a long time, it is true open source software, but unfortunately it has not been ported outside of the OS X environment, so this is only a qualified answer.

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BibDesk, indeed, is an excellent tool. It doesn't offer a built in syncing feature across computers, but this can be achieved in other ways such as Dropbox or git. I highly recommend BibDesk! – crash Nov 30 '12 at 12:41
up vote 2 down vote

The only alternative that comes to my mind is Zotero:

  • It is open-source,
  • it comes as a standalone application or as a Firefox add-on,
  • it integrates with Word or OpenOffice,
  • it syncs with the Zotero server,
  • it has BibTeX export,
  • ...
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Is it truly free? I think that the client only is; the server is proprietary. – Federico Poloni Nov 27 '12 at 12:27
That is true, but Zotero can be used without the server. Your data will never be locked, you can always export it. – matth Nov 27 '12 at 12:30
It can be used partially without the server. Only a subset of its functions will still work. – Federico Poloni Nov 27 '12 at 12:31
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What functions don't work without the server? Except syncing to the server, of course? – matth Nov 27 '12 at 12:34
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Well, syncing data among different clients. :) There is really no technical reason why this couldn't be done on a completely FOSS stack. It is only a commercial choice. I don't blame them, that is their business, but it is a fact that Zotero is not 100% open, despite their claims. – Federico Poloni Nov 27 '12 at 18:03
up vote 1 down vote

Finally I found I, librarian on http://www.bioinformatics.org/librarian/ which is a kind of mixture between Filestorage-Server, JabRef and a personal open source Mendeley server.

Interested users may try the demo account on the website.

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up vote -4 down vote

I work for Mendeley, so you may think I'm biased, but I can address the factual error in your question above. Anyone can sign up for Mendeley or contribute documents for free. It's also free to interface with the network via http://dev.mendeley.com

I think where you may have gotten confused is that the client we release is proprietary, at the moment, but we aim to release it as open source soon, and there are other clients which interact with the web service which are open source.

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No, I think it's correct to describe Mendeley as not being "free and open source" in the FOSS or FSF sense. Although it doesn't cost anything for most uses, its source isn't (yet) available under a Free Software or even Open Source license. – interfect Nov 22 '12 at 0:17
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Let's focus on the server side: unless I am mistaken, Mendeley is a hosted service which you cannot host yourself, because the server-side code is not open source… is that right? – F'x Nov 22 '12 at 9:45
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@WilliamGunn given that both server and client are currently proprietary, I do not see where there is a “factual error” in the question… – F'x Nov 26 '12 at 23:13
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Interesting to hear, that the Mendeley client may be open source in the future. Can you provide a time frame within which this might happen? – crash Nov 27 '12 at 10:19
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@WilliamGunn: I don't think anyone is criticising Mendeley for not being open source, I like the idea, and it's nice approach. What I'm criticising is that you say "there is a factual error in the question", which is not true. By any standard, the server code and the client code are not open source. Not that they should be, but the OP explicitly asked for a free and open source solution. – Charles Morisset♦ Nov 29 '12 at 8:13
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