Mendeley's Encrypted Repository is Fundamentally Anti-Science Hacker News ran a story the other day highlighting Mendeley locking in users to their product by encrypting their own data preventing external apps from easily exporting their data. Essentially, PDFs go in, but they don't come out - a…

Polar 1.9.0 Released Polar 1.9.0 was just released. This release is mostly focused around stability and fixes a number of important bugs. One big new feature went into this release though - you're now able create pagemarks across multiple pages. Documentation Here's the excerpt from the…

The EU Plan S for Open Access to Scientific Research The EU and China have an ambitious new plan to provide open access (OA) for scientific papers: Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries…

Building Cloud Document Sync with Google Firebase About a month ago we shipped a new version of Polar which enables support for cloud sync backed by Firebase. Polar is a personal knowledge repository for your books, PDFs, and web content which supports annotation including highlights and comments…

Polar 1.5 with Cloud Sync Support for multi-device sync based on Google Firebase I'm proud to announce that Polar 1.5 shipped this morning. One of the most exciting features of this release is support for cloud sync. Cloud sync allows you to keep all your documents, PDFs, web page captures, and…