The current edition of the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet has a couple of nice interviews with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Cameron Neylon on Google Wave, and me talking about Mendeley. My segment starts at 7:54mins – I haven’t listened to it because, as I explained earlier, watching/listening to myself makes me cringe like the the people in The Ring (though I don’t instantly die a gruesome death).

Enjoy:

A shorter write-up of Cameron’s and my interview is also on the BBC News website: Strength in Science Collaboration.

School is back, so we thought it would be a good time to demonstrate how Mendeley can help professors, teachers, and alike to set up a “Recommended reading” list for their incoming students:

1) Create a new collection in Mendeley (left-side pane)
Don’t worry about the name you give the collection. If you want to rename the collection later just double click on it.

2) Select papers from your library (middle pane)

Make a selection of papers that you would like to include in your “Recommended reading” list and drag & drop them into the newly created collection. Note that you can have papers in multiple collections.

3) Make your newly created collection public (collections are private by default)
Click on your collection (left pane) to see the papers you’ve added to the list. You’ll notice there’s a “Edit Settings” button above the list (top-right of middle pane). Click it to change your Collection access settings from private to public. Feel free to add a short description of your collection’s content. Finally, press “Sync Library” and a link will be generated for your public collection.

4) View your public collection online and more
By clicking on the link that was created for your public collection you will be taken to your public collection web page at Mendeley Web where you’ll find the list of papers you included in your “Recommended reading” collection. So far so good.
You’ll notice on the left-hand side the title you gave your collection and your name after “Created by…”. There you also find the papers you added! (See one of my public collections here)

5) Sharing the goods
You find the tools you need to easily share your public collection on the left side of the collection’s web page. “Embed on other websites” and “Subscribe to RSS”. Let’s focus on the first one, since it’s the easiest one and will allow you to add your list to your class page with a simple copy & paste of provided code.
Click on the “Embed on other websites” option and a text field will show up with code you can use to display your “Recommended reading” collection on your class site.
Notice that there is a “Preview and Customize” button that will allow you to do exactly what they say, preview your collection list or customize the color and size of the frame that will display your list.

6) Copy, paste, stay up-to-date
Once you’ve picked the right color and size for your embedded reading list, you simply copy the provided line of code in the text field and paste it into the HTML of your class page. It’s that simple!
While you’re at it, keep in mind that this is the only change you’ll have to do on your page to keep the list up-to-date. If you want to add a new paper to your reading list, just open Mendeley, import the file and drag & drop it into the public collection you created for your class and sync your library. That’s it.

So there you go, in 6 simple steps you set up your “Recommended reading” list for your class and any updates or changes from one year to the next is easily maintained within Mendeley.

This example can be adapted to a number of other situations. For example for lists of published work on a personal or lab website, a list of recently read papers on a blog, just to name a few.

If you happen to run into any issues setting up your public collection for your class (or for anything else!), please feel free to contact us at support@mendeley.com.

What a weekend that was! We hosted the Fringe Frivolous Blogging Unconference (organized by Jenny Rohn) on our roof terrace on Friday night, and co-organized Science Online London 2009 (with Nature Network) at the Royal Institution on Saturday. Martin Fenner has already collected a few thoughts and blog posts on the conference.

Together with Richard P. Grant/F1000 and Virginia Barbour/PloS, I also gave a talk on “Real-Time Metrics in Science” – it went rather well until, five minutes into the discussion, an iPhone alarm started to ring and its owner didn’t stop it for a full 5 minutes. All told however, it was great fun – and we’ve vowed to return with Science Online London 2010 next year!

Without further ado, here are my 30 favourite pictures of the merry proceedings. Curiously, both the FringeFrivolous and the Solo09 set end with Gulliver, the BioMedCentral Turtle.

Fringe Frivolous Blogging Unconference @ Mendeley

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As an addendum to Jason’s earlier post, here’s a story of scientific discourse gone horribly wrong. It would be funny if it wasn’t so.. somehow really not funny.

How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps

Via björn.brembs.blog.

Last evening I attended a panel discussion entitled, “Making the Web work for Science” hosted by Science Commons. It was held at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and moderated by Tim O’Reilly. On the panel were Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Stephen Friend, MD, PhD President, CEO and a Co-Founder of Sage; and John Wilbanks, VP of Science at Creative Commons.

While I was hoping more would be discussed on modeling the habits of researchers with web tools, the focus on Open Science was still a good conversation. At one point, Dr. Friend mentioned the need to publish negative results. With the ability to inexpensively self-publish and distribute data on the Web, why then, aren’t we seeing more of this?

Trying to answer from my own experience as a researcher, there are at least three reasons, or rather fears:

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I just got an invitation from Jen Dodd, whom I met last fall at the Science in the 21st Century Conference at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo (what a great conference that was!). Jen is organizing a fabulous event:

Science 2.0:
What Every Scientist Needs to Know About
How the Web is Changing the Way They Work

The MaRS Centre, 101 College St., Toronto
Wednesday, July 29, 1:00-6:00 pm, with wine and cheese to follow

Wine, cheese and a speaker list like this – who could resist:

• Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
  Titus Brown
• A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
  Cameron Neylon
• Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
  Michael Nielsen
• Using ”Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
  David Rich
• How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
  Victoria Stodden
• Collaborative Curation of Public Events
  Jon Udell

Here is more information about the event on the organizers’ blog.

Ironically and sadly, even though I’ll be on the right side of the pond when this event takes place, I won’t be able to attend – Jan and I will be hosting a session at this year’s Campus Technology Conference in Boston at the same time.

However, if you’re interested in these topics, here’s a little reminder about our own Science Online London Conference taking place on August 22.

Ever hear of Douglas Prasher? Probably not. He just missed out on this past year’s Nobel in chemistry. That’s not unusual, as many scientists never even come close to a Nobel. What is unusual, is that Dr. Prasher works at a car dealership, not in a lab. Despite doing the critical research on discovering GFP that became the work for last year’s Nobel Prize, he was unable to find grant money and a job to continue his work.

Prasher’s story is what concerns me with science, engineering, math, and technology. In the U.S., we are constantly hearing about how the country is falling behind in science. We need more scientists to fill all of those jobs we want to create. And the cure to that is to fund more PhD programs! Yet, when you ask graduate students and postdoctoral scholars what their individual experiences are, a science career is a very tough road with low pay and few career prospects. It’s such a tough path that an entire PhD comic strip was born to alleviate the situation with laughter. Why then, is there such a disconnect?

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Following last year’s successful “Science Blogging 2008” conference in London (see Victor’s blog post), we are happy to announce a slightly rebranded “Science Online London” as this year’s follow-up conference. The event will take place 22 August 2009 at the Royal Institution, London, and is co-hosted by Nature Network, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Mendeley. To accomodate for a wider range of topics (i.e. not only science blogging), we changed the name to “Science Online London”, and we encourage you to suggest topics for the programme.

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

As stated on the Science Online London webpage, “Topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifies and measuring the impact of research.” Subscribe to the newsletter, send us your ideas – and let us know if you want to sponsor the conference. We’re all very much looking forward to meeting you at the Royal Institution on 22 August!

Exciting news: Jason Hoyt, the founder of Ologeez (a semantic frontend for PubMed), is joining Mendeley! Jason holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. At the moment, he is still based in Palo Alto, but once the visa issues are sorted out, Jason will be joining us here in London as our new Research Director. TechCrunch broke the story today with a headline that made our geek hearts beat faster, comparing us to a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in London.

To get started, Jason wrote up his reasons for joining us, and how Mendeley can help change the Impact Factor. Over to him:

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Changing the Journal Impact Factor

Right, so the first thing I had to ask myself was “Why on earth would I move from San Francisco, leaving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.

Well, I’m not going to answer by talking about how great the team is or how enthusiastic the founders are about improving research, which is certainly all true. Rather, let’s take a real-world example of how the “tech” behind Mendeley is already making a difference with how we view the impact factors of research.

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Today we can announce another bit of news that makes us very happy! For a while, we’ve been looking for help in better engaging the academic community, involving it more in our roadmap decisions, and also understanding the needs of life scientists better. Consider this: We’re all social scientists, computer scientists and engineers here at Mendeley HQ, and we couldn’t pick this guy PubMed out of a police lineup.

Ok, I’m exaggerating (our next release of Mendeley Desktop, due next week, will enable manual PubMed ID lookups, and the next release after that will do PubMed lookups for all your PDFs automatically). However, the help we’ve been looking for has now arrived in the congenial, talented and Portuguese shape of Ricardo Vidal, author of My Biotech Life! You can see his picture on the top right, and his “silly microbe” design down on the left.

Ricardo will become our first “Community Liaison”. While continuing on with his graduate studies, he’ll also devote a few  hours each week to interacting with other researchers on the blogosphere, Twitter, and other social media on Mendeley’s behalf.

I first came across Ricardo’s blog around June last year, because he had written an article about his research paper management needs. So I left a comment pointing him to Mendeley, and he asked for a few invitation codes to the then-ongoing private beta for his readers. We were happy to give him twenty, which were gone only hours after Ricardo offered them on his blog! We loosely stayed in touch ever since and were grateful for the continued support he’s given us over time.

For this announcement, I asked Ricardo to briefly introduce himself and describe why he decided to join us as a Community Liaison and what his hopes for Mendeley were. Here are his answers:

Introduction
Let’s see… I’m currently concluding my Master of Engineering degree in Biological Engineering at the University of Algarve, in Southern Portugal. I’ve been blogging since 2006 at My Biotech Life and am also the co-founder of the DNA Network, a leading network of DNA-related blogs.  I also produce (sometimes silly) biotech graphics and logos from time to time.

Why I joined
Besides the fact that I am terrible at keeping my digital papers in order on my laptop or online, I believe that Mendeley represents not only a two-in-one solution for research paper management but also comprises another aspect that I consider of extreme importance, networking. The ability to contact and share your work with researchers alike is invaluable.

Hope/vision for Mendeley
Looking at the progress that has taken place since Mendeley’s launch, I can only hope that things keep evolving as they are now. The roadmap looks promising and the user feedback can only make it a better piece of software as time goes by.

As it has been stated, I also envision Mendeley to become the “Last.fm for Research Papers” where user statistics and networking play a vital part in research, by providing easier access and interaction to scientific information.