Sean Takats

Sean Takats

Recent posts

A Few More Dismissal Details

1 minute read

We’re still waiting for the court reporter’s transcript from last week’s dismissal of the lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters targeting Zotero, but a few more details have surfaced regarding the nature of the ruling. Judge Gaylord L. Finch, Jr. dismissed the Thomson Reuters complaint due to a lack of jurisdiction. The dismissal was without prejudice, which means that the judge did not bar Thomson Reuters from refiling its lawsuit. Whether the corporation can or will refile is unknown (to me) at this point. While it does not appear that the judge dealt with much if any of the merits of Thomson Reuters’s complaint, the dismissal is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it would seem to require that Thomson...

Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed

less than 1 minute read

I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The lawsuit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media “reverse-engineered” Thomson Reuters’s EndNote software to provide data interoperability between Zotero and EndNote. As co-director of the Zotero project along with Dan Cohen, I look forward to witnessing the Zotero team now devote its full attention to crafting the pathbreaking new features that are immediately on the development horizon: customized research recommendations, innovative annotation tools, and pioneering collaborative functionality. It’s worth noting that even while the lawsuit was underway over the last nine months, Zotero geniuses completed the implementation of such radical new functionality as cloud-based synchronization, shared...

Zotero Makes the New York Times

less than 1 minute read

Today Olivia Judson features Zotero in her excellent science blog, The Wild Side. In a generally positive review Judson points to Zotero’s ease of use and ability to grab metadata from a variety of sources. Fortunately for Zoterons, the features that Judson finds lacking in Zotero are already present in either the current 1.0.7 release (integration with research databases like JSTOR, PubMed, Web of Science) or in the 1.5 Sync Preview (automatic association of PDF metadata). In the notes accompanying her post, Judson draws attention to the growing problem of siloed data, with academic research increasingly housed in subscription databases. In attempting to address this important problem, I would note that we are far ahead of any competing software, offering...

Zotero Website Overhauled

less than 1 minute read

Notice anything different? Aside from the addition of “Login” and “Register” links to the upper right corner of the Zotero site, you might not detect many changes. The most visible difference is new unified login functionality to support the site’s various functional modules. Users can also now use an OpenID account to authenticate with the Zotero site. Beneath the surface, the guts have been been entirely reworked. Zotero’s web application team, led by Jon Lesser, has created a streamlined new architecture designed to support the vast array of innovative, web-based functionality that we will begin to roll out to users beginning this month. Stay tuned!

GMU Responds to Thomson Reuters Lawsuit

1 minute read

The full press release can be found at the university’s media relations site, but the upshot is that George Mason University has formulated a strong response that includes dropping its EndNote license and retaining the Zotero project’s contested EndNote compatibility feature. This functionality allows users to read their own EndNote styles (.ens files) and has been reenabled in Zotero’s public testing program this week. At the same time, our crack team of developers continues its breakneck pace of providing exciting new features. The latest preview release of Zotero includes: Free and automatic backup and synchronization of your library data on Zotero’s servers: for example, you can sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at...