As you may have read on Slashdot:

“Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia’s George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU’s Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format.”

Perhaps I am biased because I currently attend George Mason Law and I’m trying to start a Students for Free Culture chapter here, but I think that it would be great if we took this opportunity to stand up for open source software against frivolous lawsuits. Even absurd lawsuits can occupy many years and tons of money and effort to dispose of completely (e.g. the SCO – Linux lawsuits), and Zotero / GMU can use all the support they can get. I found Tim Hwang’s pre-conference proposal for a free culture agenda to be very inspiring, especially his first suggestion to “Create A Preemptive Ultimatum Around Creative Works” and defend creative people who because of their reliance on e.g. fair use may be targets for lawsuits. To be sure, Tim’s proposal was to threaten activism as a deterrent to prevent people from being sued in the first place, but that obviously doesn’t preclude also organizing activism around people who have already been sued. His proposal was also more directed at artists and remixing, but given clause 3 of the Open University Campaign, “The university embraces free software and open standards”, supporting Zotero would be an extremely relevant piece of activism.

How can we support Zotero?

George Mason University itself has taken an excellent first step: in a recent e-mail to the student body, GMU has stated that “The University will not renew the institution-wide license for the citation management software EndNote when it expires on November 30, 2008″, due to the pending litigation. While students and faculty can still purchase their own personal copies of course, GMU recommends that everyone consider migrating to Zotero right away, and they have established a website to help people migrate their citations to Zotero.

It seems to me that if any universities are paying for site licenses for Endnote they should join George Mason University in refusing to renew their Endnote license and instead direct funds towards supporting Zotero development (or other developing open source citation management systems). Companies that sue their customers are usually on their way out anyway, it’s time to get off of the sinking ship and prepare for the future. The person who sent out the e-mail about the decision to the GMU community was John G. Zenelis, the “University Librarian/Associate Vice-President, Information Technology”… there may be someone with a similar position at your school who you could talk to. Why not try talking to your university librarian(s) today about transitioning your school from Endnote to Zotero?

Short of changing your university’s policy, of course, you can just stop using Endnote and start using Zotero yourself! Download Zotero today!

P.S. I don’t have much of a need for citation management software at the moment, but I do use one nifty feature of Zotero which lets you save a “snapshot” of a page exactly the way you are seeing it at the moment. I use it to take snapshots of things created by CGI scripts such as ticket confirmation windows which are impossible to save a link to, things I don’t expect to continue to be available such as articles that are going behind paywalls, and things which I expect to change such as wiki pages. The snapshots are saved as a folder with all of the HTML, images, javascript etc. which are necessary to render the page exactly the way it was, and the snapshots can be opened by any web browser. If this sounds nifty to you, give Zotero a try even if you don’t need citation management software. I know this isn’t Zotero’s primary purpose, but I enjoy it nevertheless The more people who use it the better, even if it’s not for the original intended purpose.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.