UPDATE: The RFIs have now been posted and there’s a petition opposing the RWA on whitehouse.gov.

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. (more…)

It isn’t to obtain tenure. And it isn’t for money. Although to some, that is what publishing has become. The rationale for why we publish is (should be) to communicate results to as great an audience as possible and advance our understanding of the world around us. At Mendeley, we started to wonder how we could help communicate results and bring new models to the publication ecosystem. We think that Open Access content, where the full-text is readily accessible to all, will be the standard communication model in the future. And as such, we are rethinking how we shape our discovery algorithms. (more…)

Think of all of the ways you connect with others and discover new information online. How many of those platforms do you use for research? How do you keep up with the speed and amount of research that’s being created, discovered, and disseminated? How can we apply the implications of today’s open and real-time research to advance scientific discovery?

As part of Social Media Week, Mendeley is hosting an event to address these questions together. Registration is free. Bring friends. Meet new friends.

Let’s get offline and talk about how you, your research, and the web intersect.

Join us at the Google NY headquarters (foursquare id: 15816790) on Tuesday, February 8th at 3-5pm for “Research Gone Social: Leveraging the Web to Advance Scientific Discovery”, a distributed global event featuring more than 7,500 attendees across 200 events.

Please RSVP here and include the #smwresearch #smw11 #smwnyc hashtag for posts, tweets, pictures, etc.

Speakers include:

Chris Wiggins, HackNY co-founder, Associate Professor of Applied Math at Columbia University
Gabriel Willow, Urban ecologist, Science & Learning Specialist at theWildLab
Margaret Smith, Librarian for Physical Sciences at New York University
Jan Reichelt, Mendeley co-founder

Let’s play the blame game. Government and universities have failed researchers.

I have written before that there are too many PhDs being produced every year. That’s our most viewed post with twice the traffic of the third most viewed post. I think that says something. The result of too many PhDs has meant a surplus of academics doing multiple post-doc tours of duty, lower wages, and a waste of tax payer money. All would be fine if there were enough jobs outside of academia to support those researchers in industry and government, but there are not. Let’s clarify that, there are not enough jobs willing to pay PhDs what they are really worth. And guess what that gets you? Sure, some really smart and passionate lovers of science/research who stick with it, but many of the smart people move on to careers outside of traditional academic jobs where there is money. You lose your talent.

Today is not about arguing this claim at greater length though. Today is about alternatives to this problem by asking where are all of the venture capitalists and startup angel investors?

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Jessica Hammer, a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Fellow at Columbia University, shares her candid thoughts about Mendeley. Thank you, Jessica, for taking the time to chat! You’ve helped us to kick off what may be a brand new series of Mendeley stories – as told by our users themselves.

Tell us about your research interests
Officially I study psychology, but games, stories, community, race, gender, learning, technology and creativity are all part of my larger research interests. My focus is on investigating how technology interventions influence the way that people think, feel and behave.  Right now, I’m working on how games can help people adopt new ways of thinking about race and gender.

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We held another Mendeley Open Office on Friday, November 26, 2010. Trying something new, we are now doing talks. And as promised, here is the talk I gave on increasing the visibility of your research. I’ve added speech bubbles to the slides to give some of them more context in case you were not here to listen to it live. I also added a little more information that wasn’t on a few of the slides on the actual evening. This was a Friday evening talk, with dozens of people happily enjoying beverages and mingling, so needed to be kept short.

One thing that is important to point out is that improving your career means marketing it, just like you would take a grant writing course to improve your odds of funding. Some people might look down on this; they’ll be the first to be left behind in a world where finding the needle in a haystack of millions of research articles is more and more dependent upon academic search engines such as Mendeley, Google Scholar, or PubMed. This is becoming known as ‘Academic SEO’ and is a variant of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. And just like regular SEO, there are expected methods you should be doing to get your content indexed. There are of course things that you shouldn’t do, and that’s where we need to start drawing the line and is a discussion for another time.

If you are having trouble reading some of the text, then click on the menu and ‘View Fullscreen’ option.

Jason Hoyt is Chief Scientist & VP of R&D at Mendeley. Where, among other projects, he oversees the indexing of content and the search/recommendation engines. Follow him on twitter @jasonHoyt

To everyone who came out to our Office Event: a special thanks for braving the cold and warming us up.

We met lots of fun and interesting people from NYU, Columbia, SPARC, New York Academy of Sciences,  American Museum of Natural History and a few twitter invites. The night started with yummy food and delicious drink. Then Jan talked about Mendeley’s journey from an idea between friends to a research network that spans the globe. Our guests made their way over to our trivia wall for a bit of fun and before we knew it the night was over.

On behalf of the NY Team, thanks for a  great night. So great that we’re hosting more in the future. If you have any ideas about what we should do or who we should invite, don’t hesitate to let us know. We’re looking forward to it!

Our new Cafepress Store is up and running. Now you can eat, sleep, and drink in style. We’ve covered the basics: t-shirts, hoodies, magnets, mugs, etc. But Cafepress is customizable, so if you need a baby pajama for a future Mendeley user, let us know and we’ll add it to the store. And FYI, this store is for our fans, not for profit. We’re not earning commission on the items you buy.

Our Chief Scientist Jason Hoyt already has boxers. I’m definitely buying buttons. So get a Mendeley mug and drink… label side out.

Visit our store: http://www.cafepress.com/Mendeley

This week marked the beginning of the annual Open Access Week 2010 event, running from Oct 18th-Oct 24. As the challenge this year Dr. Philip E. Bourne, Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego and Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, called upon scholars to think beyond free and ready access to the literature – made possible by Open Access – and consider how technology may be deployed to advance research, to truly mine the increasing amount of available literature.

At Mendeley, we share the goal of making research more transparent and aim to provide the best productivity and collaboration platform for researchers. So we wanted to share an effort we are contributing for this week, and ask for YOUR contributions.
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At Mendeley, we’re continually impressed by the uses people find for our service, so we occasionally showcase some of these stories that demonstrate why Mendeley is such a powerful tool.

In this post, meet Professor Griffin along with Ashlinn Quinn and a team from Columbia University who are involved with the Global Honors College and learn how Mendeley works for them.

Ashlinn Quinn

Professor Griffin

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) focuses on enhancing education with the purposeful use of new media and technology. The Center provides support for a number of Columbia University online platforms, such as its wikis, blogging, and course management systems and also develops custom educational projects including online simulations, case studies, training sites, and more. During the past year, a team at CCNMTL researched and curated a suite of tools to be used in the Global Honors Seminar, an annual, summer-long intensive course hosted by Waseda University in Tokyo in which faculty and students across nine universities spend three months researching, debating, and documenting a specific area of research. The first part of the course, which began in June, is conducted entirely online, and then students meet for a final on-site phase where they continue their work in person.

CCNMTL set out to find a way for over 50 students and faculty to track and share their research. They were specifically seeking a tool that would allow students to seamlessly build a shared bibliography of annotated references on a range of topics covered throughout the seminar, and they found Mendeley’s social bibliography tool to be a great fit.
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