The Quintessence of Ham

Brian Crox­all recently lit up the com­ment feed at the Chron­i­cle with his ProfHacker com­par­i­son of “Zotero vs. End­note,” where the debate cen­tered mostly around issues of cita­tion fidelity. As Fred Gibbs notes, how­ever, “while cita­tion for­mat­ting is one major rea­son to use bib­li­o­graphic soft­ware, it isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the only or even pri­mary rea­son, espe­cially in the human­i­ties.” Zotero’s cita­tion func­tion­al­ity was always imag­ined merely as bait: by pro­vid­ing this labor-saving func­tion­al­ity, Zotero would encour­age each user to move her research into what amounted to a fully search­able and share­able rela­tional data­base that could be sub­jected to text min­ing and other analy­sis. Here researchers could begin to do truly remark­able and new things with their evi­dence.

A few com­menters, as well as Fred, tried to shift the dis­cus­sion toward the issue of cost and open­ness, and in par­tic­u­lar to Zotero’s sta­tus as free/libre open source soft­ware (FLOSS). Many of Zotero’s most ded­i­cated users have cham­pi­oned the soft­ware in the name of FLOSS, but this line of argu­ment fre­quently falls on deaf ears, or even ears that are con­di­tioned to reject FLOSS as some­how anti-market or anti-capitalist. From my per­spec­tive, FLOSS in and of itself is a fairly unper­sua­sive argu­ment for using Zotero, akin to knee-jerk calls to “Buy Amer­i­can!” in the 1980s, when the USA still did some man­u­fac­tur­ing. Buy­ing Amer­i­can and using FLOSS might make one feel some sense of moral supe­ri­or­ity, but at the end of the day can those feel­ings still paper over our sense of exis­ten­tial dread when faced with dri­ving to work in our crum­bling K-cars or cob­bling together a dis­ser­ta­tion with shitty research software?

Just as Zotero’s cita­tion man­age­ment func­tion­al­ity is a means to an end, so is licens­ing and devel­op­ing the soft­ware as FLOSS. Far from just ide­ol­ogy, FLOSS has allowed Zotero to lever­age rel­a­tively lim­ited finan­cial resources to out­per­form vastly larger and bet­ter funded com­peti­tors, old and new. Zotero’s annual oper­at­ing over­head is only in the low six fig­ures. This amount cov­ers in-house devel­op­ment, out­reach, and infra­struc­ture costs. In com­par­i­son, End­Note and Mende­ley each have oper­at­ing costs that are an order of mag­ni­tude greater (or even more). And of course there’s an even higher, hid­den cost for these plat­forms: the expec­ta­tion of sub­stan­tial profit, which nec­es­sar­ily impinges on sustainability.

Why should any researcher care about these issues? Defend­ers of Zotero have often voiced con­cerns about “lock-in” with pro­pri­etary, for-profit soft­ware. Users might find them­selves unable to migrate their data out of one of these com­mer­cial solu­tions at some later date. But even if this worry were valid — and I don’t know that it is — lock-in in and of itself isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. Who would com­plain about being locked-in to the very best solu­tion, par­tic­u­larly if that solu­tion also didn’t cost any money?

Unfor­tu­nately, the closed, for-profit soft­ware option has never been the very best solu­tion, and there’s no sign that that sit­u­a­tion is chang­ing. This isn’t ide­ol­ogy speak­ing; it’s his­tory. End­Note has been derided for well over a decade for its 1990s inter­face and preda­tory “upgrade” cycles. New fea­tures come late or never, and the soft­ware has yet to embrace online research and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Mende­ley, while far newer and the­o­ret­i­cally nim­bler, has like­wise only slowly moved to pro­vide the basic, core func­tion­al­ity that active, pub­lish­ing researchers require. It’s entirely likely that “fea­tures” like jour­nal abbre­vi­a­tions, cita­tion page num­bers, and sub­col­lec­tions will even­tu­ally make their way into Mende­ley, or that End­Note will one day dis­cover the inter­net, but the mere fact that these things haven’t yet tran­spired speaks vol­umes about the pri­or­i­ties of their par­ent corporations.

Because it’s FLOSS, Zotero has been able to add and refine fea­tures thanks to the con­tri­bu­tions of hun­dreds of vol­un­teer devel­op­ers and the feed­back of hun­dreds of thou­sands of users. The tech­no­log­i­cal suc­cess of this model is unde­ni­able: Zotero’s open-source cita­tion engine, entirely rewrit­ten by Zotero user Frank Ben­nett, and the thou­sands of user-contributed style files the engine uses have already been adopted by Mende­ley and Papers, and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from XXXXX has expressed inter­est in doing the same.¹ (Update: The indi­vid­ual who wrote regard­ing XXXXX and CSL clar­i­fies that the com­mu­ni­ca­tion was made in a per­sonal capac­ity, not as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and so I’ve removed the software’s name.)

And of course, there is no rea­son to think that any of these par­ties is act­ing in the inter­est of serv­ing ide­o­log­i­cal inter­ests. Indeed, if we look at how they pub­licly address FLOSS, we find ambiva­lence and dis­dain. Mende­ley only admit­ted its use of Zotero code when con­fronted, and avoided any men­tion of the prove­nance of its cita­tion styles for years. Frank’s cita­tion pro­cess­ing engine, despite sav­ing count­less hours of devel­op­ment and sup­port, earns faint praise. Papers like­wise ini­tially only con­fessed its planned use of the cita­tion styles when probed on Twitter.

Lib­er­at­ing researchers from the con­straints of com­mer­cial soft­ware devel­op­ment has been good for research, not for ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons but for tech­ni­cal ones. It has also been extremely good for com­mer­cial com­peti­tors, who rec­og­nize the value in openly devel­oped soft­ware. What’s not at all clear is that attempt­ing to put the genie back into this par­tic­u­lar pro­pri­etary soft­ware bot­tle will sus­tain any of the remark­able momen­tum gained over the past few years, or whether inno­va­tion will con­tinue to be stunted or sti­fled in pur­suit of illu­sory finan­cial gain.

As com­menters on Brian’s post noted, there is a real cost asso­ci­ated with mov­ing between research soft­ware, and it’s inevitably in the inter­est of for-profit enti­ties to keep those costs as high as pos­si­ble. Right now the mar­ket won’t bear very high costs, but that’s largely thanks to Zotero, not because it’s free but because it’s FLOSS. End­Note, Mende­ley, and the rest sim­ply aren’t equiv­a­lent play­ers, because the mar­ket that they’re squab­bling over is checked in growth and in all like­li­hood doomed to decline so long as there is a strong FLOSS competitor.

1. To my knowl­edge, not a sin­gle pub­li­ca­tion style file has ever been con­tributed by a non-Zotero user. [↩]

Tagged FLOSS, K-car, zotero

§ 11 Responses to Zotero Versus"

• Yvonne Perkins says:

  6 May 2011 at 6:07 am

  Zotero vs End­note and open source. Per­ti­nent posts by @stakats
  http://tinyurl.com/3fqwkec and @fredgibbs http://tinyurl.com/6yf9uvu
• Constance Wiebrands says:

  6 May 2011 at 6:44 am

  RT: @perkinsy: Zotero vs End­note & open srce. Per­ti­nent posts by @stakats http://tinyurl.com/3fqwkec & @fredgibbs http://tinyurl.com/6yf9uvu
• Sean Takats says:

  6 May 2011 at 2:45 pm

  In response to great pieces by @briancroxall and @fredgibbs, my new blog post on Zotero, open­ness, and sus­tain­abil­ity http://is.gd/YDAu1Q
• William Allen says:

  6 May 2011 at 5:44 pm

  #Zotero Ver­sus The Quin­tes­sence of Ham: http://bit.ly/lhIuJR Inter­est­ing take. #soft­ware #bib­li­og­ra­phy #cita­tion #endnote
• Bruce says:

  6 May 2011 at 10:08 pm

  The “sus­tain­abil­ity” ques­tion is an inter­est­ing one. For com­mer­cial play­ers the ques­tion becomes “what do we do if peo­ple don’t pay us to use our soft­ware? ” For pri­mar­ily grant-funded FLOSS projects like Zotero, the equiv­a­lent is “what hap­pens when the grants dry up? ”
• Rintze Zelle says:

  6 May 2011 at 11:49 pm

  Zotero vs. the World

  Open­ness
  I think that when it comes to choos­ing a ref­er­ence man­ager, Zotero’s open source nature is very effec­tive in attract­ing (or cre­at­ing) power users, as it allows them add or improve fea­tures to scratch their own itches (and often learn new skills doing so). Of course, as these fea­tures get incor­po­rated, this also ben­e­fits “reg­u­lar” users. Zotero proved an impor­tant nur­tur­ing ground for the Cita­tion Style Lan­guage, and the Zotero user com­mu­nity con­tributed most of the CSL styles in exis­tence. Sim­i­larly, with­out Zotero Frank Ben­nett would prob­a­bly not have under­taken his mon­u­men­tal effort to cre­ate the first CSL 1.0 proces­sor. CSL, the col­lec­tion of CSL styles, and Frank’s CSL proces­sor have since found their way into other tools (Mende­ley uses all three, Papers uses its own, closed source, CSL proces­sor). In this respect, the open source nature of Zotero is stim­u­lat­ing inno­va­tion in the entire field of ref­er­ence man­age­ment soft­ware, arguably much more so than its closed source alternatives.

  And because grant fund­ing takes pop­u­lar­ity into account, the choice of reg­u­lar users to use an open source ref­er­ence man­ager can have sig­nif­i­cant impact on future innovation.

  Sus­tain­abil­ity
  If we limit our­selves to End­Note, Mende­ley and Zotero, we see very dif­fer­ent busi­ness mod­els. End­Note has a very tra­di­tional (and proven to be suc­cess­ful) busi­ness model: licens­ing soft­ware on a per-user or insti­tu­tional basis. In con­trast, Mende­ley and Zotero cur­rently both offer pre­mium accounts with increased online stor­age capac­ity. How­ever, while Mende­ley relies heav­ily on pri­vate equity, and is explor­ing insti­tu­tional sub­scrip­tions, adver­tise­ment, and mon­e­tiz­ing con­tent, Zotero’s non-commercial model is based on grant money and donations.

  As a Zotero user, a ques­tion in which I’m very much inter­ested is whether insti­tu­tions be con­vinced to finan­cially sup­port open source tools like Zotero (another intrigu­ing exam­ple is Octave, an open source alter­na­tive to Mat­lab). While many insti­tu­tions are faced with bud­get cuts, finan­cially sup­port­ing open source tools would allow them to com­pete much more effec­tive with their com­mer­cial coun­ter­parts. If, as a result of such invest­ments, insti­tu­tions can drop sub­scrip­tions to those com­mer­cial tools, this might very well be an effec­tive cost-cutting mea­sure in the long run.
• Sean says:

  10 May 2011 at 3:08 pm

  FLOSS projects have typ­i­cally been deemed more sus­tain­able because they pre­sum­ably offer the pos­si­bil­ity of a softer land­ing in the event that the project implodes. In other words, if the source is or has already been open, it will be eas­ier for oth­ers to pick up the pieces and con­tinue, or at least to extract their data intact and not via some ter­ri­ble, lossy for­mat like RIS.

  I don’t find this argu­ment par­tic­u­larly con­vinc­ing, since it relies on a dooms­day sce­nario that’s exceed­ingly unlikely to occur with estab­lished, com­mer­cial play­ers. Instead, what makes FLOSS, at least in the case of Zotero, appeal­ing from a sus­tain­abil­ity per­spec­tive is the dra­mat­i­cally lower over­head faced by the project. We spend a ton of money on infra­struc­ture, but we have rel­a­tively low devel­op­ment costs because we can rely on our devel­op­ment com­mu­nity and on the inte­gra­tion of other GPLv3 tools.

  This rel­a­tive econ­omy, in turn, is essen­tial when it comes to sus­tain­abil­ity. Zotero is already at the point in terms of stor­age sales where it can pay for infra­struc­ture and a decent amount of devel­op­ment indef­i­nitely. Where grants will remain impor­tant in the short term is for huge changes in the code that will be even more trans­for­ma­tive than Zotero Every­where. But in terms of keep­ing the project hum­ming along, we’re already in great shape.

  In con­trast, some­thing like Mende­ley requires mil­lions of dol­lars per year, and on top of this, there is the expec­ta­tion that rev­enue will sig­nif­i­cantly exceed this over­head, at least in order to attract a buyer. That’s an extremely dif­fi­cult posi­tion for any project to be in, and one that Zotero for­tu­nately does not have to face. Yet at present Mende­ley is work­ing with a sig­nif­i­cantly smaller and less estab­lished user base and, for the moment, pre­cisely the same busi­ness model. It has been a great model for us, but it’s clearly not going to sus­tain them.
• Rintze Zelle says:

  11 May 2011 at 8:22 pm

  For Zotero, is there any­thing hold­ing back the peri­odic release of a) over­head costs (infra­struc­ture and devel­op­ment) and b) income via grants and stor­age sales? (or is this infor­ma­tion already avail­able somewhere?)

  I think insti­tu­tions would eas­ier switch to Zotero if you could con­vince them with num­bers that Zotero is in good shape. More infor­ma­tion on the roadmap (which grants are used for what) would help as well (plus it would help in attract­ing more developers).
• Steve says:

  12 May 2011 at 10:54 pm

  At the end of the day, regard­less of the open/closed nature of any project’s source code, a mar­ket with com­pe­ti­tion is bet­ter for *all* users than one with­out. I think all the prod­ucts men­tioned (as well as oth­ers that aren’t) are doing great things to ben­e­fit researchers in gen­eral, and in time, things will only get bet­ter (as they have proven to in recent his­tory). And that, I think, is the point.
• Sean says:

  12 May 2011 at 11:54 pm

  I’ll cer­tainly agree with you that what you call “the point” does fairly describe Zotero, and I’m relieved to hear you say the same about your employer, Mende­ley (if I may). Where I’ll dis­agree, per­haps only because I’ve been on the using end of these tools for a very long time now, is that all of these prod­ucts are “doing great things to ben­e­fit researchers in gen­eral.” My col­leagues and I see cyn­i­cal mon­ey­mak­ers who are milk­ing a run­away train of insti­tu­tional money that could be far bet­ter spent else­where. Ask your­self, how much inno­va­tion was there in this space, even when there was mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion, until there was a crit­i­cal mass of devel­op­ers and users to pro­duce new code and func­tion­al­ity that could be used by every­one, includ­ing Mende­ley? Do you remem­ber how lam­en­ta­ble your own cita­tion func­tion­al­ity was until you began using CSL and Zotero plu­gin code, and how much it has improved yet again now that you’re using citeproc-js? We’re talk­ing about the absolute core, sine qua non func­tion­al­ity of all these prod­ucts, now inar­guably best-in-class, and it’s entirely founded on three tightly inter­wo­ven and purely open projects. And what about Zotero’s open trans­la­tion archi­tec­ture? How valu­able was that and the trans­la­tors in devel­op­ing your own sys­tem of ingest­ing online con­tent? No one will ever know, nor will they ever be able to share the ben­e­fits of your own devel­op­ments in this space. It’s absolutely your right to look at open source as a one-way street, but it’s disin­gen­u­ous to pre­tend that it’s an equi­table relationship.

  It bears remind­ing that Zotero is and always has been a research project in its own right. It’s part of the research projects divi­sion which I direct at the Cen­ter for His­tory and New Media. As a result, the project remains 100% focused on the needs of prac­tic­ing researchers and aca­d­e­mics because, well, that’s not only my job it’s also me. Mende­ley still claims to be run by researchers, but that’s less true by the day, isn’t it? That would be like Dan Cohen and me say­ing that Zotero is run by col­lege guys. I mean, we were, once upon time, but not today. I sup­pose I failed to make a per­sua­sive enough case in my piece, but I’ll say it again: these dis­tinc­tions are not merely seman­tic or ide­o­log­i­cal. They have a real bear­ing on the kinds of out­put and and the qual­ity of expe­ri­ence for indi­vid­ual users and for the research com­mu­nity as a whole, not least of all users of Mendeley.

  I’m really happy that you wrote here because based on what I can glean about your role and what I’ve seen you write in the past, you’re not at all in the cheer­lead­ing busi­ness, and so I’m extremely inter­ested in what you have to say. Thanks for stop­ping by.
• Alfredo Mazzamauro says:

  16 May 2011 at 7:20 am

  RT @stakats: Zotero Ver­sus http://is.gd/YDAu1Q