darcusblog

Dan Cohen has a link to an official comment from GMU on the Thomson Reuters lawsuit, the most choice two sentences being:

CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Review to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote.

So they’re not backing down from the belief that they are within their rights to release the functionality to read Endnote style files, and they’re dropping their site license in response to the heavy-handed lawsuit. Excellent!

Of course, this still isn’t anything but a stop gap solution until we manage to have better CSL creation and editing.

Along with Thomson Reuters’ lawsuit against GMU/Zotero, they’ve also sought to close down access to their style files. They have done this by slapping a terms of use agreement on their own online style archive. But, some Endnote users have asked, what does this mean for them sharing their styles?

We have an answer:

It has always been and continues to be our policy that licensed EndNote individual and institutional customers are free to customize and share style (.ens), database (.enl & .enlx), filter (.enf), and connection (.enz) EndNote files created using EndNote with other licensed EndNote users for use solely in conjunction with the Software.

Jason Rollins, EndNote Product Development

So, someone asks in reply, what does this really mean?

Just for clarification: would these limitations apply not only to files that were originally distributed by EndNote, but also to files that are created in EndNote from scratch? I can’t find anything in my current EULA that would limit my rights for such files and no other software I have seems to make these claims. If I write a paper in Word, Microsoft doesn’t limit my distribution rights of that file.

Answer, from Thomson Reuters’ alternative universe:

Just to be completely clear, it has never been possible to create an EndNote Bibliographic Output Style file (.ens) file “from scratch”. When one creates a new .ens file from within EndNote, this is actually a modification of a file template that contains thousands of characters of code that defines many default and essential characterics of the file and its interaction with other components of the overall EndNote application.

Wow; this is really breathtaking! I really can’t believe they actually want to claim that they own ALL Endnote style files and can constrain how they’re used! Nevermind that any file, of any format, is going to contain many default and essential characteristics of the file and its interaction with other components; it’s true of a Word template file, or some database, or whatever.

This is the most ridiculous IP claim I’ve seen in a long while. I hope some of the legal blogs that have been following this manage to pick this up and analyze it from a more formal legal perspective.

One of what I hope is just the beginning of institutional backlash against Thomson’s suit against GMU is that institutions’ decision to drop Endnote. As they announced:

With litigation pending between Thomson and Mason, we’re letting our campus site license for EndNote expire at the end of November. When it lapses, any copy of EndNote that was downloaded and installed under the terms of that license will have to be uninstalled and removed.

They’ve also setup a nice website for current Endnote users to help with their migration to Zotero.

Lawsuit; (a) definition:

What companies often do to smaller competitors when they fear they otherwise cannot compete on the merits of their products.

Make no mistake, this is a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate. To quote from the complaint:

A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert - in direct violation of the License Agreement - Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.

So what are they complaining about here?

1. They say that GMU reverse engineered Reuters’ EndNote software to create Zotero. They cannot possibly demonstrate any evidence to support this claim, as it is not true. What Zotero does in order to read Endnote style files is no different than what, say, OpenOffice.org does to read Microsoft Word binary files. All the Zotero team did was figure out how to map the style files to Zotero internal style structure, which has no connection to Endnote, but is in fact based on development work on CSL. Thomson’s complaint, then, has the same merit as if Microsoft were to sue OpenOffice.org for its ability to read .doc files.
2. I suppose they might have some legal basis for complaining if Zotero distributed Endnote style files (no doubt most of which are developed by Endnote users), but they do not.
3. Finally, Zotero does not technically convert Endnote style files to CSL files; this only happens internally.

It is my hope that individuals and institutions see this lawsuit for what it is, and that it becomes yet another reason to in fact support Zotero (and other free solutions) and move away from Endnote. It is also my hope that Zotero and George Mason are not intimidated by this, and that they might see some help on the legal front to fight it.

Another year, and another Endnote release. Its developers have announced a new feature: what they call groups. This is basically user-defined folders.

Here’s the thing: Zotero has had this feature from the beginning. Zotero also still goes way beyond Endnote in its support for notes, tagging and so forth.

So let’s see … you can pay $99 upgrade fee for a generally more limited application, or you can get a superior application for free, and contribute to a genuine movement.

That movement is one where users fully shape the direction of the application. Indeed, most of the people involved in coding or designing Zotero and related pieces are scholars; users who know what they want and need, and want to create something better than existing alternatives like Endnote.

A second principle that flows from the user-led orientation of Zotero is that data must be free.

Finally, a consequence of the open data and open code approach to Zotero is that it creates new opportunities. One simple example is word-processor integration. As a start, one of the Zotero developers added support for Word. Then a Zotero user came along and improved that, and then still another outside developer who wanted to add equivalent (and compatible) support to OpenOffice (to be released soon). I expect to see a whole ecosystem of similar innovations build up over time.

A few years ago I actually gave up the Endnote ghost. I had been beta testing the first version that ran natively on Mac OS X, and been really frustrated by the poor quality of what I saw. As I was starting work on a book manuscript, I was finding Word crashing regularly, and I knew it had something to do with Endnote. So I complained; about that, and a whole lot of other things.

A project lead actually told me at the time something like “if you don’t like Endnote, use something else.” So I did! Not finding any good alternatives, I asked the question “what would it take to create a better and more open alternative to Endnote?” When enough people start to ask the same question, the answer is something like Zotero.

In poking around to see what people are saying about Zotero, I’ve come across a couple of nitpicks about the Firefox dependency. What about my Internet Explorer users?, these bloggers ask.

As a former Word and Endnote and IE (for the Mac) user, let me remind people: Firefox and Zotero and a whole host of other free software tools and applications are all about freeing users from the shackles of bad, proprietary, software. Firefox, in particular, is an example of all that is right about open source development; not only free, but superior to the Microsoft alternative.

Moreover, tools like Zotero are built in the best of open source traditions: the code is open and free (well, will be once they take it public), and it uses open standards wherever possible. It is designed and built in a way that is demonstrably different than the closed worlds of Endnote, RefWorks, and Word. You want to take the code—the SQL schema, all the really useful Javascript stuff, the CSS, etc.—and create some new solution? No problem; just do it.

Finally, instead of simply assuming your users have some sort of loyalty to IE or Endnote, why not suggest to them they try something different? In my experience, when IE users try Firefox, they often don’t go back. I expect the same will happen when Endnote users try Zotero. There’ll still be a fair bit of work to do on server synchronization and integration with desktop applications, but that’s only a matter of time.

So the lack of IE support and the decision to go with Firefox, it seems to me, is far from a problem, but rather just the opposite: they’ve made the right choices that will allow to them succeed long term.

The Chronicle has an article (which I stumbled on here) on citation management software. A couple of interesting excepts:

And a few faculty members have tried the software for their own research and then gone back to tried-and-true manual methods. One is Lowell Turner, a professor of international and comparative labor and collective bargaining at Cornell. He says his graduate research assistants urged him to use RefWorks, but he found that the program couldn’t quickly or easily import a career’s worth of bibliographic material, in a variety of formats.

Another similar point, though this one hitting on the data model theme I’ve focused on extensively here:

He’s not alone. Even though legal scholarship follows exceedingly detailed citation rules that seemingly would be well suited to a computer program, legal scholars as a whole avoid citation software, says Kevin M. Clermont, a law professor at Cornell. Legal scholars often cite arcane documents from around the world, which citation software has difficulty handling, he said.

“It’s by light years not sophisticated enough to handle our problems,” he says.

Yup, I feel his pain, and unless MS fixes their data modelling approach, I’m afraid their new support won’t work for him either. Am hoping we can get it right at OpenOffice though.

Finally, on the costs:

Since November 2003, almost 11,000 people at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities have registered for RefWorks, and they have stored a total of 570,000 references on RefWorks’ servers …

How much do they pay for this? $12,500 per year.

Sigh … so how much would it take to build a better open source solution using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails? If each institution that had such a site license put, say, $500 in a pot? No, that doesn’t include all the support issues involved in such an enterprise, but how hard can that really be?

Regretably, the article focuses solely on RefWorks and Endnote. There’s no mention at all about the forthcoming support in Word, nor the OpenOffice work I’m involved in. In both cases, these efforts will offer superior integrated citation formatting support to word processors.

Likewise, there’s no mention of interesting developments in the world of free services and software like Connotea and CiteULike. Admittedly, neither of these are general enough to serve as real substitutes, but I think it’s only a matter of time before they are.

So nice to see the article, though it seems strangely dated.

One obvious question is, what does the new citation and bibliographic support in Word 2007 mean for Endnote? Short answer: the final end to a slow death that began when ISI bought the company that originally produced it.

Somewhat longer explanation:

By standarding the details of citation and bibliographic coding in Open XML, Endnote loses any technical advantages behind lock-in. In theory, any application should now be able to serve as a database for Word. So the playing field is leveled; ISI will now have to compete on the merits of their product. Will see if they use the new support in Word 2007 in their latest version (out this month), or if for some reason they simply continue to implement their legacy non-standard approach.

The problem for them, I think, is that reference management is increasingly moving to the web. My library catalog can now automatically load a bibliographic record into a RefWorks account, which I can then access from any web browser. This is really useful to me, and it’s a trend that will only accelerate over time.

Endnote users often trumpet the ability to search catalogs from within the app, but I really don’t think a) this is that hard to do (there’s open source code to do it from Index Data), and b) it’s not where the future it. As a user, I want to load reference data from my web browser. Also, Microsoft has the Research Pane tool, which should be able to be configured to plug into any number of library web services.

So why would a user spend $100/year to stay up-to-date with a limited, buggy product that is bound to the desktop?

Of course, it seems ISI recognizes the need for a response, and this press release states it is coming in the form of a web-based version of Endnote. I won’t be using it, instead sticking with RefWorks for the short-term, and hoping to contribute to better open source solutions long-term. Ruby on Rails + AJAX + a few smart designers and coders really ought to constitute a killer alternative.

In my post on Endnote alternatives, Alf Eaton had sent me a ping about RefWorks, to which I replied I hadn’t beeen impressed the last I looked at it, something like a year ago.

Well, I just took another look, since my university has a license. It seems to have improved quite a bit, and is now quite useable. It has a fairly rich data model as these things go (indeed, it seems to be richer than Endnote’s at this point), and has good integrated search capabilities.

However, its XML export support is actually even worse–at least in terms of the design of tha format–than Endnote’s. Bizarrely, most of the output is the actual schema, while the content itself is a single “row” element with a ton of attributes, which are printed regardless of whether there is any content.

Well, at least it seems do well with RIS output.

I still wish we’d see a free software alternative. This isn’t exactly rocket science, and there’s room to best RefWorks, particularly in the GUI.

So two grad students came to ask me about Endnote today. The first had already bought it and was struggling to figure out some basic interface issues. The second had apparently heard my rant about the application secondhand, and so wanted to check with me before going out and buying it himself. “Should I buy Endnote?” he asked.

With great hesitation, I said “yeah, probably; there just aren’t any real alternatives I’m aware of.” I can’t tell the guy to mess with XML/XSLT/RDF after all. He just wants a nice GUI app to manage his references and format his citations and bibliographies.

However, I really don’t want to have to do that again. Long term, of course, it’s my hope that we’ll be able to provide a better, and free, alternative, but in the meantime, anyone know of any other acceptable options for Word/Windows users?