The US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently issued a Request for Information on their existing policy requiring some federally-funded work to be submitted to Pubmed Central, where it’s freely accessible to the public. We were pleased to have the opportunity to respond and a summary of our response is below. Before getting into that, however, I’d like to take a little detour and talk a little about our mission and how that relates to the scholarly endeavor. Our mission at Mendeley is to help researchers organize research, collaborate easily with colleagues, and discover new research. Read more »

The new year brings some big news! We’ve partnered with Swets, a leading subscription management company, to create the Mendeley Institutional Edition. This tool will allow librarians and institutions to connect their collection directly to researchers; aid collaboration among students, professors, and colleagues; and see the impact of the institution’s research output.

Within their institutional profile, librarians can assist their users in a number of ways:
Read more »

There’s a great discussion that’s been going on over the past couple weeks on the LIBLICENSE-L mailing list. I particularly liked what one of the participants, Jan Velterop (CEO, Acqknowledge) had to say, so I asked him if he would like to contribute a guest post and he graciously agreed: Read more »

If you’re like most people I know, you’d like to keep up with technology, but you just don’t have the time to sit down and spend a few hours learning how to use a new application. We understand. Give us an hour on the 13th or 14th and we’ll get you up and running, so you can enjoy the productivity enhancement with minimal time investment.

There will be two sessions, both at 2 PM EST on December 13 & 14. The first session will focus more on topics relevant to librarians, while the second one is designed for researchers in academic institutions. Both sessions will be introductory and suitable for folks with no prior experience, but will also give updates on getting the most out of newly released features. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: Read more »

We, along with PLoS, have been overwhelmed by the huge response that academics and the developer community have given to open up science. When we announced this contest to develop science applications on top of the Mendeley and PLoS platforms last March, we were not totally sure that anyone would even be interested. Boy, were we wrong!

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and one of five all-star judges, said this about the Binary Battle –

“I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It’s time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?”

Mendeley launched the API platform in April of 2010 with the hope that it would 1) spur innovation in the science ecosystem and 2) send a signal to others that opening up data benefits everyone. To date, more than 1000 developers have applied for API keys to build on top of that data. With the Binary Battle announcement, we hoped to carry open science further and by all accounts we did.

Today we announce the winners of the 2011 Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. We narrowed the Binary Battle entries down to the Top 10+1, and then handed the voting over to our list of expert judges (Werner Vogels, Juan Enriquez, Tim O’Reilly, James Powell, and John Wilbanks. We also opened the vote up to the public to count as 1/6 and combined with the judges. It was great to see that both the public voting and the judges voting correlated very well. It was so close for many of the apps, but one stood out to both the judges and the public…. Read more »

Image via blackbeltjones

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending Science Hack Day with about 150 other scientists and hackers. It was an amazingly fun event with people from all over the world coming together to build cool, quirky, and otherwise awesome things over the span of a weekend. It’s a sort of high holy day for geeks like me, so I was especially thrilled that Mendeley was able to be a sponsor this year. It was also fun spending quality time with some of the PLoS developers and collaborating on a fun hack. Here’s some of the highlights: Read more »

Calling all librarians and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: Read more »

If you’re like most professors I know, you’d like to keep up with technology, but you just don’t have the time to sit down and spend a few hours learning how to use a new application. We understand. Give us 40 minutes of your time on the 22nd and we’ll get you up and running, so you can enjoy the productivity enhancement with minimal time investment. Read more »

We now have our Top 10+1 Binary Battle apps. We are sending those on to our panel of expert judges: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

Now though is your opportunity to voice who should win the battle. We’ll take the aggregate total decided by the public and add that to the judges’ votes to determine the overall winner and runner-up.

You’ll have until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, November 28th, 2011 to get your vote in.

Go to the public vote now

We’ve got another addition to the trophy case here at Mendeley. Fast Track has given Mendeley a “One to Recognise” award. Fast Track champions the UK’s top-performing private companies and entrepreneurs and The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s 100 private tech companies with the fastest growth over the past three years. Co-founder Paul Föckler was presented with the award on the 16th of November and it puts us in very good company. Of course, we couldn’t have done this without the support of the million plus researchers that make our service as valuable as it is, so we are very grateful for the support we have received and are committed to making the next three years even better.

GO Team Mendeley!