Zotero under fire

Zotero the excellent, free, open-source reference manager is under fire from its closed source competition via a law suit. Thomson Reuters the makers of the unstable and expensive market-leading Endnote software have sued George Mason University, the developers of Zotero, for "violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base" (Courthouse News Service). The complaint comes primarily from the fact that the latest version can import Endnote styles. I picked up on this from Neil Saunders' blog post who puts it really well

"Here’s my simple, black-and-white view of the world. The greatest achievement of the internet is the potential to set information free. There are free-thinking, forward-looking organisations like GMU who see this potential and act upon it. There are also organisations who see only threats to their corporate interests. Publishing corporations no longer control the flow of information to consumers and some of them seem to be struggling to accept this, adapt and move on."

Our support should definitely go to George Mason University who have moved the world forward and improved it with not just a piece of software but a great implementation of the open-source idea. This is software driven forward by users, in this case initially at the GMU's Center for History and New media. Comically there is also a claim that "GMU reverse engineered Reuters' EndNote software to create Zotero". I don't see any signs of that, thankfully they are not very similar in any meaningful respect, Zotero is generally much better. Zotero works nicely from within a web browser, Endnote works when it feels like it.

Zotero is not alone however. There are a growing number of free (though often not open source) web based reference management systems. Maybe Thomson Reuters are just trying to mark out some territory and delay the inevitable a bit longer. Ultimately they are going to fail, I just hope their lawyers don't hurt Zotero too much on their way down.

Using Endnote bibliography styles in Zotero

I just downloaded and tried installing an Endnote style. It worked beautifully. Although how to do it seems obvious to me now, it didn't 15 minutes ago, so here is what I did.

1. Go to Endnote styles page and download the styles you want.
2. Open Zotero and open the preferences pane, choose Styles from the icons at the top
3. Click the + button at the bottom right corner
4. A window appears allowing you to select and import the style from wherever you just saved it

It should then appear in your style list. I just did this for BMC Evolutionary Biology which you can see in the window screenshot given here. I haven't yet investigated whether you can batch import files.

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview is an update to the mostly excellent Zotero reference collection and management software. The big change here is that your references can now be synchronised across machines via the Zotero server. I haven't experimented very much with it since the launch yesterday but after a quick look it seems excellent, a very helpful addition. Another big change that was mentioned is the ability to use more than 3000 Endnote bibliographic styles to format your citations. I couldn't quite see how to implement this, but I only really played with Zotero1.5 for about 10 minutes last night so it might be in there. It requires Firefox3. Now if they could only get Microsoft to fix MS Word 2008 to accomodate bibliography tool bars again we would be there. I saw a blog recently (forgotten where) with someone saying that an institutional licence for RefWorks is around $10k. Zotero is free, and does all the same things, often much better, than RefWorks. It is also a community driven open-source project and needs supporting for that reason alone.