It is true that investing in Zotero seems like a good idea, but there are 2 points to caution:

1. Will such sponsoring be after all a source of revenue and profit for Zotero? As in, it is meant to be free for social cause from what you are saying, hence we have to be careful when we are sponsoring them money

2. Will the company eventually be profit driven rather than socially driven?

I believe that Zotero can seek for funds, but if that is so, there are also other free reference managers such as Wizfolio and Mendeley that should be sponsored as well.

It is hard for Zotero to replace all of them, as each has its unique capabilities – Wizfolio is very good for science while Mendeley is useful for social networking.

Hope all of these eventually be for a good cause for society through effective and efficient research rather than for business profits.

I like zotero but it’s not nearly as flexible and it provides so few output formats. I imagine it’s good for undergrads who need APA, Chicago or some other common style but it’s almost useless to professional work in the sciences.

you’re screwed right?

But there’s a bigger issue. The Zotero project has the potential to be a genuine user-led revolution in the best tradition of free software efforts like Mozilla. I’d like to see scores of users and institutions pitching in to really dramatically improve on all of the solid technical potential in the Zotero foundations, to evangelize it to students, and so forth.

To promote and contribute (in whatever form) to Zotero is thus much more than consumers choosing among like products, but really about investing in that world of open possibility. Other projects can freely pick up the code and the standards that Zotero uses to deliver still other solutions. If Zotero were to implode tomorrow, anyone could pick up the pieces and run with it.

By contrast, if you invest in a proprietary product like Endnote or RefWorks, that investment can never go farther than that vendor. You are basically paying for its internal development (which is guided by business concerns that do not always align with user interests), that gets crystallized into propriety code that can never be reused.

Just as a simple example, I’m the author the XML citation style language Zotero uses. Our vision for that is an open language that can be used in any product (commercial or free) that wishes, and that we build up a distributed web of styles. Imagine, for example, a user being able to subscribe to a style just as they might an RSS feed. But all of that will be built on open technologies and standards. So the work we put into that will be more widely usable. Conversely, part of the reason this is all so much work at the beginning is that the styles in RefWorks and Endnote are closed.

I can understand faculty being unhappy if support went away on a product that they have been using for a long time. But at schools where such a system isn’t so entrenched (i.e. schools that just got RefWorks a year or two ago) this should be even more of a reason to move over to a free system ASAP.

As with anything, it’s all about cost benefit analysis- you have to figure out how many people are using the tools, and what the cost is per person, and whether that’s worth the cost.