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…)

We at Mendeley have now built the world’s largest open research catalog, containing over 70 million documents. This is no small feat, considering we’ve only been at it for about 2 years, and we couldn’t have done it without you (nearly a million of you!).  By bringing control of research data back to the community, we hope to make research more collaborative, open, and efficient. If you’ve ever thought, “You know, I really wish I could search the literature better” or “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could see how this idea evolved over time?” or just “I wish I had $10,001 dollars”, well, now’s your chance. (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

Earlier this year, a representative from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) got in touch with us to see if we could help get their organization started with Mendeley. Of course we agreed and recently we heard from Katarlah Taylor, a Knowledge Management Specialist at the International Food Policy Research Institute about how what we’re doing is making a difference to their organization. (more…)

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.
(more…)

This week we have released a new version of Mendeley with some major updates. The major new feature in Mendeley 0.9.8.1 is public collaborative groups.

What are groups?

Groups are a simple way for you to collaborate with your colleagues to create a shared collection of documents. Groups allow members to put together a list of papers and share notes. There are three types of groups:
(more…)

We are very happy to announce that CAT.INIST, one of Europe’s largest scientific research catalogs, has added Mendeley’s ‘easy import button’ to its article pages. CAT INIST joins the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and ArXiv.org who have also added Mendeley’s import button to their article pages.

CNRS, “Centre National del la Recherche Scientifique” (the French National Research Institute), provides research articles and information for scientists and academics Europe-wide. The cooperation now allows users to quickly import articles to their Mendeley online library.

“CAT.INIST (established in 1973) hosts a collection of 15 million bibliographic records, held in the CNRS in Paris. The catalog provides research articles in the fields of Science, Technology, Medicine, Humanities and the Social Sciences.”

Additionally, by installing Mendeley’s Web Importer into your browser, you can easily import articles from many other databases as well, such as Google Scholar, PubMed, IEEE, ISI Web of Knowledge, etc. For a complete list of supported websites, have a look at http://www.mendeley.com/import.

For more information on CNRS’ catalog visit http://cat.inist.fr.

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.