EndNote's Parent Company Gets Nasty

Here at the University of Sydney, we are encouraged to use EndNote citation software to manage our reference material. There isn't much discussion of competitors or alternatives to EndNote, but if you look, you'll find that there are quite a few out there. From a user's point of view, it's important that there are strong competitors to EndNote, because competition will push EndNote to try to make their software the best, to fix the problems that it has, and to add new, useful features.

Unfortunately, the parent company of EndNote seems to have decided that they will pursue a strategy of attacking their competitors, rather than trying to be the best. They've recently filed an apparently baseless suit against a new-ish competitor, Zotero.

I thought it was worth bringing this to your attention, because Zotero supports reference formats that anyone can use, while EndNote uses proprietary formats that other products can't read. Imagine if this happened with gene or protein sequence files! The Zotero strategy is far more in line with an academic needs, and they deserve our support.