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…)

As we cross over into the latter half of the academic semester, I can already tell it’s going to be a great semester for us. We’ve crossed over a million users and have seen millions of documents added in the past few months. This isn’t to toot our own horn, though, because we couldn’t have done it without the support of the wonderful Mendeley community. So I’d like to take a few sentences to thank everyone who has made this our best semester yet.
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We want to invite YOU to be part of Mendeley by becoming a Mendeley University Advisor!

If you are a power user and are enthusiastic about Mendeley and what we want to achieve and you’d like to spread the word about us at your university – while receiving some great benefits along the way – now’s your chance!

Hundreds of your friends and colleagues around the world have joined as Mendeley Advisors. They serve as official Mendeley representatives at their institutions and help us keep in touch with Mendeley’s growing userbase. See who’s in your area on our Advisor Map or check out upcoming events on the events page. (more…)

Calling all librarian 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. We’ll discuss topics such as:

• What Mendeley is (and what it’s not)
• Who’s using Mendeley
• How Mendeley works with your existing information systems
• Mendeley and intellectual property
• Mendeley’s role in the future of libraries

William Gunn, Head of Academic Outreach will be conducting this session. There will be plenty of time for questions after and during the session.

Date: Friday, May 20th 2011 Time: 10:00 am EDT Presenter: William Gunn

UPDATE: You can attend via ipad with the updated GoToMeeting software, but you’ll need to update on the day of the webinar, so join a bit early.

Last Friday, 30 folks came over to the Mendeley offices in New York for drinks and conversation. Attendees were from all over the city, including NYU, Columbia, City University of New York, Einstein College of Medicine, and Nature Publishing’s NY. James Hedges and Umesh Rajashekar, post-docs from The Laboratory for Computational Vision at New York University spoke briefly about how they use Mendeley and how they’re trying to spread the word about us. They initially picked Mendeley because it’s cross-platform and has great annotation features, but came to realize that the social networking component is really useful for finding related research. Their main challenge has been convincing their PI and the senior post-docs who are already set in their ways that it’s worth the time to switch to Mendeley. It’s worth mentioning that two of the top 10 papers in computer science on Mendeley are on the subject of computer vision, so perhaps they’re doing a really good job!

Here’s a few pictures from the night: (more…)

Handy evergreen
Leading the reference scene
Mendeley on screen

We ran a contest for a few months asking our Mendeley Advisors to submit a haiku on their Advisor application and then taking submissions from the Mendeley community at large. Dr. Stewart Dods won with the above haiku. We were well impressed at the level of erudition and subtlety among our community and hope everyone had as much fun with it as we did.

Congratulations to Dr. Dods. Here he stands by his 20 L biofermenter, ready to grow some fabulous Fab’-secreting E.coli. (more…)

As the worldwide Mendeley community has grown, the number of wonderful people and places we need to visit has similarly grown. Since nobody has uploaded that paper on how to clone yourself yet, we’re resorting to the next best thing… (more…)

The “social web” has become the nexus of collaboration and discovery, but how supportive are the existing tools at making leads to scientific discovery? Mendeley co-founder, Jan Reichelt, will show Mendeley’s approach to connecting scholars with information and, by doing so, unlocking it. Mendeley is the world’s largest research collaboration platform, with 750,000 researchers and academics and 65 million research papers indexed in Mendeley’s public research catalog.

Audience members can participate by submitting their questions during the webcast.

Join us on Tuesday, February 15 at 10am PST / 1pm EST by pointing your browser to http://webcast.training.apple.com/.

Webcast ID: MacLearning
Passcode: 379625

Thank you for participating in our Social Media Week event held at Google New York yesterday. Our panel session addressed scholarly communications and we are thrilled to have hosted it. SMW organizing committee and Google team – you are awesome! (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