We are proud to introduce Robert Knight - yet another boost to our development team. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the company of a certain other knight who said “Ni” (and from whom we rented our previous office):

Still, we think Robert is a much better fit to our team. Ni!

——

Robert Knight joins Mendeley as a software engineer working on Mendeley Desktop. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in June 2008. In his spare time, Robert is a contributor to the KDE project and develops the Konsole terminal. In the past he also wrote the BlueIDE development environment for DarkBASIC and contributed to KSpread.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2008

Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The founders’ vision to create a “Last.fm for research” excited Skype’s former founding engineers, who became investors, and former Last.fm executive chairman Stefan Glänzer, who is now executive chairman of the company.

London, UK - When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”

After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype, who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita through their investment fund ASI. Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”

About Mendeley: Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The company was founded in 2007 by Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt and is based in London, UK.

Screenshot 1: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers.

Screenshot 2: Mendeley Web lets researchers access their papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded scholars and academics.

For further information contact Victor Henning (victor.henning@mendeley.com), Tel: +44-207-2531595, or visit www.mendeley.com.
###

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. I won’t be able to travel to the AMA Summer Conference. At this time tomorrow, I should have been at the beach of San Diego with Michael and Thorsten and a nice cold beer, but it was not to be. My cough from the viral infection hasn’t completely disappeared yet, and a weeks’ travel to California would have worsened it again… what a major bummer!

However, after a month of working from home, I have returned to the office. And as promised earlier, here’s a brief guided photo tour:

Exihibit A shows a room full of software engineers.  They occupy the west wing. They’re all so talented that they have little halos around their heads, but you can’t see them in this picture due to the backlight from the window. True story!

Exhibit B: The east wing. This is where we non-software engineers gather (notice the puny monitors and machines).

Our meeting room at lunchtime. Paul’s arm stretches out inconspicously, stealing someone’s food (or so I presume).

Our kitchen. Jan.. trying to sell me a coffee machine?!

Me in my corner, trying to take a break by hiding behind a book. Fittingly, it’s titled “Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness“. Incredibly fascinating stuff! I’ll probably write about it on this blog later.

Outside our windows, enveloping darkness has settled in, and thus the long night of bugfixing has begun. I have witnessed a mysterious phenomenon: After dark, wherever large groups of software engineers congregate, large quantities of pizza boxes spontaneously materialize out of thin air.

After writing so much about the other fun speeches, sessions, and things to do at the ESOF2008, I didn’t manage to talk about our own session, “Euroscience’s Interactive Workshop: Development of a virtual network custom designed for scientists”, which took place on Monday afternoon.

The sessions was started off by Professors Peter Westh and Roberto Poli, who each presented their vision for an interdisciplinary network for researchers. In their view, ontologies and semantic knowledge will play a key part in establishing a useful network that is not merely a “Facebook for scientists”, but helps to connect researchers through highlighting common areas of interest or - as Prof. Westh emphasized - possible new applications of existing knowledge.

That, of course, was music to our ears. We’ve talked about our “Mendeley = Last.fm for research” vision before on this blog, but the EuroScience workshop was the perfect venue for tossing the idea around a bit further. After all, Last.fm has managed to create the largest ontological classification (and the largest open database) of music in the world, by aggregating the musical tastes of its 20 million users and then data-mining it for similar musical genres, artists, and songs.

So our presentation was aimed at exploring how these principles could be applied to research. You can find an abridged version below! I tried my best at voiceover narration, but doing it in front of my computer at midnight just doesn’t turn out as lively as standing in front of an audience:

After the talk, we got great feedback from the audience. The panel moderator, Jens Degett, even wondered whether we just might have solved the major problem of Open Access - the researchers’ lack of participation: With Mendeley, researchers have an increased incentive to post their articles online, because it enables them track the evolution of their readership in real-time!

One of the audience members who came up to us after the presentation was Anders Norgaard, a Ph.D. student from Denmark who had some cool suggestions for future features. We also talked about open sourcing Mendeley Desktop, and I mentioned to him that we had three KDE developers on our team. This is the dialog that ensued:

Anders: Oh, really? What are their names?

Me: Well, there’s Mike Arthur…

Anders: Mike Arthur? I know him, he’s quite famous in the KDE scene!

Me: …and Fred Emmott…

Anders: Fred Emmott? The guy who’s doing Slamd64?!

Me: …yes, and Robert Knight will be starting next Monday…

Anders: Robert Knight?! He’s famous, too! How did you manage to get those guys?

Well, the credit goes to Mike. I knew that we had brilliant engineers on our team, but I was clueless that they were actually famous… Mike, Fred, Robert - I tip my hat to you guys!

Well, what can I say! The EuroScience Open Forum 2008 in Barcelona has turned out great so far. Due to its considerable greatitude and excellent greatishness, Jan decided not to let me have all the fun by myself and joined me yesterday.

On the downside, the heat and travel stress didn’t exactly help me get rid of my still-persisting cough/throat inflammation. I was barely able to sleep again for the first two nights in Barcelona, and I will need some more days rest at home when I return to London. Nonetheless, we attended some very inspiring sessions and received enthusiastic feedback on our presentation today (more on that in a later post) - let me recapitulate.

Saturday, the most interesting session was on “Open Science” or “Open Notebook Science”, on which Prof. Peter Murray-Rust from Cambridge gave a very spirited talk…

…followed by a not-so-spirited talk given by he-who-shall-not-be-named and in which every slide looked like this:

Anyhow, “Open Notebook Science” is a fairly recent idea which has gained more and more exposure in the past few months. The basic premise is that researchers should not only share their publications through Open Access outlets, but also freely publish their raw data alongside it so that it can be validated, re-purposed and aggregated.

This, of course, entails some problems: Academic careers and tenure decisions depend on publications, so how can you incentivise researchers to lay open their data before they’re certain that they have “wrung” all possible publications out of it? I believe that our “Last.fm for research” model, i.e. the chart-like tracking of which papers are being widely read, which authors are up-and-coming etc., could also be extended to raw data - thus giving credit to people who have created the raw data that others are successfully using.

Two other highlights yesterday and today were the keynote speeches by Prof. Marcus du Sautoy from Oxford and by Physiology/Medicine Nobel laureate Dr. Richard J. Roberts. Both described how they had discovered their love of science and the fields they wanted to dedicate themselves to. Little known facts:

Prof. du Sautoy originally wanted to become a spy (to get a nice black gun like his mum, who had worked for the foreign office) and thus tried to learn many different languages. By his own admission, he failed miserably because he did not find languages to be logical enough. Fortunately for him, Mathematics - and especially Symmetry, his field of expertise - offered him a way of describing and understanding the world in more logical terms. Finally, despite his obsession with symmetry, he had this wonderful quote from the 14th-century Japanese Essays in Idleness:

In everything [...] uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth… Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.

This reminded me strikingly of the Law of Closure in Gestalt psychology which describes how the mind will try to complete figures if they are unfinished - hence deliberately leaving something incomplete will engage the mind’s creativity.

Today, then, Dr. Roberts spoke about his way from unruly, almost-expelled-from-school teenager to molecular biologist and Nobel laureate.

Dr. Roberts had actually wanted to become a professional snooker player - back in the 1960s, he was West England snooker champion. That was also when he received what he described as one of his most profound life lessons:

During a snooker tournament, he had sunk an incredible “lucky shot” - but then failed to make the next one. After the game, an old man came down from the audience and said to him:

Listen, if you sink a lucky shot like that, you have to concentrate twice as hard on your next shot. Everyone can be lucky, but if you get lucky - don’t feel bad, instead work extra hard to take advantage of it.

Seems to have worked out alright for him! After the talk, I hopped onto the stage to give Dr. Roberts a brief pitch of Mendeley, since he’s now actively involved in the Open Access movement. I’m sure that he gets loads of requests like these, but if we’re lucky, who knows - he might just find our idea interesting enough to give us some feedback.

Finally, here are two pictures of me wearing a brain helmet, looking at my brain activity (and oddly, not seeing any?!):

Phew. I should stop writing now. Must sleep. Will tell more of our exploits later. Adios!

Well, my voice is slowly returning at last. It’s a race against time, because I’m invited to give a presentation at the EuroScience Open Forum 2008 in Barcelona next Monday afternoon! If my voice doesn’t hold up, I’m determined to croak and gesticulate wildly instead. The session is titled “Euroscience’s Interactive Workshop: Development of a virtual network custom designed for scientists”:

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss and give input as to how to develop a trans-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary (semantic) network for scientists on the internet. Very often it is the combination of knowledge from different fields or the borderline between different scientific paradigms from diverse research cultures which creates new ideas and knowledge. It is relatively easy for a researcher to know what is going on in their field and to have contact and exchange of knowledge with his peers. It is much more difficult to find trans-disciplinary fora for discussion.

I’m really, really, really looking forward to this! Not only will it be my first time in Barcelona, but also my first ESOF conference, and the programme looks fantastic. The talks and presentations are grouped into the following topics:

The human mind and behaviour
The Very Big and the Very Small
Open society, open science
Engineering the body
What should we eat and how should we look?
Enhancing energy security, fighting global warming
Science and Innovation Policy
Science and Art
Screening: burdens and benefits
Communicating Science

The science nerd in me will have a hard time deciding what to attend… I’ll arrive in Barcelona on Friday night and I’ll stay until Wednesday morning - so if you’d like to meet and hang out at the conference, just

I’ve been out of the office for a few days now. My cough/throat infection still keeps me quarantined at home and largely unable to speak (I can make uncoherent noises, though). Nonetheless, Jan, Paul and I were able to have some Skype calls to discuss current issues: They talked, and I had my microphone switched off and replied by typing answers into the chat window. I really felt like a classic Bond villain sitting behind a curtain, giving instructions to the minions of evil. Except that they weren’t really instructions, and my co-founders are neither minions nor particularly evil.

So, the crazy thing is: During my brief absence of four days, Mendeley has moved into a new office, and two more people have joined the team! I promise to do a photo tour of the new office once I’m back; meanwhile, let me introduce the two newest team members (in their own words):

——

Fred Emmott is a software engineer for Mendeley Desktop. Having spent most of his life before university at music school, he changed tracks and graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in computer science in June 2008.

In his spare time, he works on Slamd64 (a 64-bit port of Slackware Linux) and several smaller projects. He also spends way too much time playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Amir Rahbaran is a Ph.D. student in the field of strategic entrepreneurship at the University of Oldenburg. Entrepreneurial endeavors have fascinated him for a long time, which is why he’s studying them and why he is going to build up his own company in the near future.

He has joined Mendeley on a project basis as part of his Ph.D. thesis titled “Entrepreneurial Bricolage: an Ethnographic Study of Internet Start-ups”. Working for Mendeley is an integrative part of his empirical data collection as a participant-observer. Thus he observes everyone (including himself) and participates by helping to reach out to the academic community.

—–

When Amir contacted us, we were immediately fond of the idea that Mendeley itself would become part of someone’s Ph.D. research. As for reaching out to the academic community, you can see that Amir is already on the phone!

Also, I’m struck by what a musical company we’re becoming. Stefan is a former professional DJ who helped build Last.fm, Mike plays Jazz bass in his spare time, Steve plays guitar, Fred plays piano, guitar and flute, and I spent a long time playing bass and singing in Punk bands while working for Sony Music/Columbia Records and Revelation Records. Why are we writing code?! We should be writing songs!

Team Mendeley is happy to announce three new members! They’re all brilliant, and terrific people to hang out with, too. The latter is rather important, because we’re going to have a roof terrace at the new office, and what fun would rooftop barbecues be without terrific people? In order of appearance and in their own words:

————————–

Ben Dowling is a software engineer at Mendeley, working on Mendeley Web. He graduated with an MEng software engineering degree from the University of Southampton in 2006, where he continued to live and work until moving to London to work for Mendeley. He’s excited to be working on such an innovative project, and is looking forward to life in the big city!

Andi Rutherford is. And when not playing with words, and editing them on Wikipedia, he is also a software engineer for Mendeley Web, and plays a significant role by ensuring that your information is kept secure. He does this by actively trying to hack the site - no joke - this is basically what banks do to ensure your accounts are kept safe. He also has an unhealthy regard for standards, and can be found with the biggest smile when Mendeley pages pass W3C validation.

He comes to us by way of the University of Sussex, Imperial College London, King’s College London, and the Open University too! (I think you can guess how he spends his free time - not so much a bookworm as a bookrabbit). He is actively interested in design especially with regards to usability, and when not learning stuff he is aspiring to become a master calligrapher. Please note, he really does have terrible handwriting, so any level will be an easily quantifiable improvement.

Steve Ridout is a software engineer at Mendeley. He studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and completed his MSc and PhD on computational modelling at the University of Greenwich. During his PhD and later as a Research Fellow, he wrote software for mechanical stress analysis, optical modelling, and risk analysis. Steve is now helping make Mendeley the research tool he wished he had in academia.

When not writing code for Mendeley, Steve occasionally enjoys making games, films, and playing his guitar.

————————–

Steve didn’t mention it, so I’ll bring it up: He is also the developer behind Ape Invasion, which he programmed in his spare time to teach himself ActionScript. The dialogues are sheer comic genius, so by all means go there and play the game!

Wow, entrepreneurial icon Martin Varsavsky wrote something nice about Mendeley on his blog last night! We immediately noticed a traffic spike and a sudden number of beta test requests rolling in. Thank you, Martin!

We met Martin a while ago at an entrepreneurs’ conference and grabbed the chance to tap into his wisdom. At age 48, he has already founded seven companies, including the biotech venture Medicorp, the telecommunication providers Viatel, Jazztel, and Ya.com, and his latest venture, fon.com, which aims to provide worldwide WiFi access for free (here’s a recent NY Times profile of both Martin and fon.com). As you can imagine, it was a very inspiring meeting for first-time founders like us.

In his blog post, Martin outlines the similarities between Last.fm, the world’s largest music community, and Mendeley:

As Last.fm tracks the music you listen to and, basing on your taste, helps you discover new music and people, Mendeley helps you manage, share and discover research papers and find new articles and people with similar research interests using a recommendation engine. Mendeley also allows you to keep track of what is going on in your research field and shows you statistics about up and coming topics and authors.

Admittedly, we need to stress that not all of these features are working in the current beta version - this is a snapshot of the (hopefully near) future rather than the current state of Mendeley. Recommendations and statistics require a certain amount of data in order to be meaningful - but as the Mendeley user base grows, the possibilities of how we can make this data useful for the research community become practically limitless!

Martin mentions another connection to Last.fm: Our all-around awesome chairman Stefan Glänzer. We’ve never formally announced his involvement, but Stefan joined us a few months ago. Besides being a former professional DJ and a successful serial entrepreneur, he helped building Last.fm as the company’s chairman, so we consider ourselves truly lucky to have him on board. Not to mention the fact that he wrote a Ph.D. thesis himself, so he’s familiar with the pain!

Jan and I knew Stefan from when he was a guest lecturer in Entrepreneurship at our alma mater, the WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management. Together with Professors Peter Witt and Holger Ernst, he published a book about fast-growing start-up companies, to which Jan and I contributed a case study.

To top it off, two extremely talented web developers have agreed to join us, starting in July! We’ll introduce them on these pages soon…

We had a very distinguished visitor at our office yesterday! Prof. Bill Fitzgerald, who heads the Signal Processing Lab at the University of Cambridge, dropped by. For me, that’s one of the nicest things about working for Mendeley - we get to meet brilliant people who do research on the most fascinating of topics.

Bill, for instance, applies his data modelling expertise to a wide range of fields, from audio processing (e.g. automatically transcribing a piece of music to musical notation) to medical imaging and the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Later, during our lunch at Sapori (an Italian restaurant around the corner), he briefly spoke about his PhD research on the statistical properties of quantum mechanics. This prompted Mike to tell a Heisenberg joke I didn’t know yet: Heisenberg is speeding down the highway. A traffic cop pulls him over and asks: “Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?”. Heisenberg: “No, but I know exactly where I am!”

Yet, since Bill has been one of our earliest beta testers, we mainly spoke about his and our ideas on how to improve Mendeley and in which direction to take it. Such discussions are extremely valuable to us, so if you have any suggestions, requests, or ideas, please always feel free to contact us!