Elsevier: All your data belongs to us

A distinct sense of déjà vu kicked in Tuesday afternoon as I read a series of outraged tweets decrying the news that Elsevier, the giant publisher of scientific journals, was buying Mendeley, a cloud-based social media research platform popular with academics for such tasks as organizing citations and managing access to articles.

The aggrieved tone was almost exactly the same as the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago when Amazon bought GoodReads — at the time, the largest independent reader community on the Web.