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.

Just some good news to finish off a week full of work: Today Vic Keegan, a technology journalist veteran from The Guardian, visited Mendeley’s headquarters in Clerkenwell and did an interview with Victor and me. For us, that capped a completely surprising “The Guardian” week – this is how things happened:

MiniBar follow-up

After seeing us present at MiniBar, Vic wrote some very nice words about Mendeley in his weekly technology column:

“Standing out among a slew of interesting five-minute pitches was mendeley.com, billed as an iTunes for scientific research papers, which again prompted the ultimate compliment – why didn’t someone think of that before? You can manage your own research papers from any computer and search others and link up with other researchers. No wonder that some of the world’s major universities have already signed up. The founders point out that public research papers reflect the science of two years ago, and if that gap could be cut down it could have a big impact on economic growth.”

MiniBar was a great event anyway, but such feedback is the icing on the cake!

Update – here is another Guardian article about Mendeley: “How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough”

Mendeley on #6 of top 100 tech media companies

Even more thrillingly, on the 7th of September Mendeley appeared on #6 in the list of the Top 100 Tech Media Companies, put together by The Guardian and Europe Unlimited. To celebrate, we took the whole team to a very nice Korean restaurant for dinner, and a pub for one, two, three… drinks afterwards (you can see some pictures in our photostream on Flickr). We’re going to present Mendeley at the TMI event on 1st October at 11am – so come by and say hi (if you want to drop by before, use our Open Office Friday next week)!

Interview with Vic Keegan / The Guardian

And then today, to finish off our “The Guardian” week, Vic did the following interview with us (listen here or below) – gosh, it sounds too strange to hear yourself talking! All in all a very intense but rewarding week – now I’m looking forward to the weekend!

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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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.

The year 2009 is halfway through and already we’ve seen some great stuff being published, created, and predicted that could have a major impact in the future. Each of the eight items were chosen because they could influence how every one of us communicates, learns, and lives more so than any other discoveries so far in 2009. What’s that? You’re not a science or techie person? It doesn’t matter, you and everyone else are going to be affected because of the work and ideas brought forth below. So, pay attention. We start with some exclusive, never before public news from NASA, very fitting as today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.

1. NASA starts project Nebula (new exclusive information) Nope, this isn’t another space probe. This is the government giving a head nod to cloud computing. They’ve wisely hired a few seasoned Internet entrepreneurs to command the mission at NASA Ames and take NASA data into the cloud. That much has been known since May. Last week I had dinner with Chris Kemp (CIO, NASA Ames) and some of the Nebula team. Here’s what Kemp agreed to reveal publicly for the first time:

”NASA collaborates with hundreds of universities, commercial partners, and other federal and international partners. The NASA Nebula cloud computing platform will dramatically increase the efficiency and productivity of these collaborations.”

How it affects you: If you’re a NASA collaborator or want to become one, then get ready. As for every day citizens, you too will reap the rewards of Nebula via the research performed. There’s also been a lot of speculation that Nebula will power data sets other than just NASA’s, such as data.gov. Is this true? Let’s put it this way. Their focus, for now, is on NASA’s data. The rest is my opinion only: imagine the possibilities if we had a national or even international cloud computing platform. Remember that it was originally a similar government project called ARPANET that gave rise to today’s Internet. This could be BIG for science, tech, and planet Earth.

Hurdles to jump: Kemp and team must first get this rolling with NASA before opening it up to outsiders. And it’s government, so there’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape to cut through to get this done and costs down. President Obama and Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO), if you’re listening, then help this team out by cutting that tape and give them carte blanche funding to get it done.

More info: Official NASA Nebula website – Follow Nebula on Twitter

2. The ozone has been saved – sort of

Ever ask yourself what the ozone layer and our planet would look like today if we hadn’t passed some of those pesky environmental laws back in the 1980’s? Researchers, led by Paul Newman, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and elsewhere asked “What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated in 1987?” This was an important and difficult to answer question, until this year. I reached Dr. Newman for a comment to let us know the most important message from this research:

“If chlorofluorocarbons had not been regulated by the Montreal Protocol, two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been destroyed by the year 2065 with a consequent increase of surface ultraviolet radiation to extreme levels.”

How it affects you: While the conclusions were based on computer models, the importance of environmental policy cannot be overstated, and now we have proof that policy does work. Oh, and your grandkids will get to play outside in 2065. Even by 2020 it would have been pretty nasty without SPF 3 billion lathered on. Check out these neat simulations, such as the image above.

Hurdles to jump: As you may know, we still have a slight problem with a thing called “Global warming.” Lots to do in order to reduce carbon emissions.

More info: Original study

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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!

A few days ago, William Gunn blogged about a fascinating idea for a paper recommendation engine and also described Mendeley’s role in it. His post then generated a lively discussion on FriendFeed.

Perhaps due to our relatively well-known affiliation with Last.fm, our idea for a research paper recommendation engine had always involved tags and collaborative filtering. But William brings up Pandora, another type of recommendation engine which doesn’t rely on critical mass, but on scoring music based on a certain set of dimensions.

So I was wondering, how feasible would such a human-scored recommendation engine be for research papers, and how could one do it? If one were to transplant the Pandora approach 1:1, one would have to find suitable dimensions on which to score papers – but what could those be? Epistemological position (e.g. positivist vs. constructivist), academic discipline, methods used? Or would you have to define a slightly different set of dimensions for each academic discipline? As opposed to music, where you can score tracks based on instrumentation, mood, tempo etc., I feel that it would be rather difficult to use this level of abstraction for research paper recommendations, but maybe I’m wrong.

Of course, you could think of tagging as a form of (binary) scoring, too, but without pre-defined dimensions. I thus remain convinced that tagging and collaborative filtering will be very good starting point for our recommendation engine. However, William’s suggestion made me think of an additional possibility.

Here’s what we might do: We have been planning to gradually add “Paper Pages” to the Mendeley site over the next few weeks. There will be one page for every paper in our database, containing the metadata, the abstract (if possible/available), some usage statistics about the paper, links to the publisher’s page (if available), and (later on) commenting functionality. We were also thinking about crowdsourcing approaches to enable users to correct mistakes in the metadata or merge duplicates.

Incorporating William’s suggestion, we could also give users the option to explicitly link paper pages to each other, and then say “this paper is related to this other paper because ___”. Two papers sharing the same tag may implicitly suggest a relation, but it might also be a case of a homonym – the same tag meaning two completely different things in different disciplines. An explicit link would solve this problem.

I didn’t have much time to fully think this through, and any further ideas would be appreciated!

My jetlag is in full swing as I’m writing this from my room at the lovely Walper Terrace Hotel in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. The local time is 10pm, but my inner clock (still set to GMT) tells me it’s 3 in the morning, thus lending incredible appeal to the hotel bed behind me. But I’ve decided to grim up and write about the conferences and workshops I’ve been attending in the past week, because everything whizzes by so fast that the backlog of blogworthy events is just getting bigger and bigger.

So, to start off, I participated in the Science Blogging 2008 Conference that was held on the 30th of August at the Royal Institution in London. More on that later; the conference was preceded by a “London Science Tour” on the 29th of August, led by Matt Brown, Editor at Nature Networks, writer for The Londonist and genuinely nice guy. Matt took us (a group of science bloggers + me) on a day’s walk to a number of scientific points of interest, exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection and behind-the-scenes tours the Linnean Society of London, and the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. I could sit here all night enthusing about the incredible wonders nature on display there, but I’ll just say that – if you get the chance – you should see it for yourself. Here are some of the pictures I took:

Wellcome Collection – Malaria info booth

Wellcome Collection – Creepy crawlies that spread diseases

Linnean Society – Butterfly specimens collected almost 240 years ago

Linnean Society – Coleoptera of 1772, pleased to meet you

Linnean Society – 17th century books on horticulture

Darwin Centre – 8.6m squid “Archie” (Architeuthis dux)

Darwin Centre – A “really big-headed fish in a tube” (excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre – A “really poor, cute beaked guy in a glass” (belonging to the Tachyglossidae family? Excuse my ignorance)

Darwin Centre – Snake specimens

During the walk, I got to know some very nice people such as Heather Etchevers, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Martin Fenner (who by now has posted an interview with me on his blog), and Mo Costandi, author of the brilliant Neurophilosophy blog.

The funniest moment came later that night at a pub in Soho. Mo had just introduced me to some guy named Vaughan, and we were standing there with a pint of beer, talking about this and that. Up to that point, I had only exchanged about two sentences with Vaughan, and instead had started telling Mo about how my favourite neuroscience/psychology blog was Mind Hacks and how great Mind Hacks was – and Mo pointed over to Vaughan and said: “That’s Vaughan’s blog!”.

So I got to know the author of Mind Hacks by accident, which was completely awesome. As it turned out the next day, someone else shared my feelings. Ben Goldacre, famous Guardian Science Blogger, told a similar story about meeting Vaughan at the pub that night (”No way, you’re the author of Mind Hacks?! I LOVE Mind Hacks!”) during his opening keynote speech at the conference.

Well, so much for my plan to write about Science Blogging 2008, the Southampton Open Science Workshop, which I attended subsequently, and the Science in the 21st Century Conference, where I am now, in one go. It’s already 4.32am on my inner clock now, and I can’t resist the bed any longer. I guess this will be a multi-part post…