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 now have our Top 10+1 Binary Battle apps. We are sending those on to our panel of expert judges: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

Now though is your opportunity to voice who should win the battle. We’ll take the aggregate total decided by the public and add that to the judges’ votes to determine the overall winner and runner-up.

You’ll have until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, November 28th, 2011 to get your vote in.

Go to the public vote now

The results are in! Mendeley and PLoS staff both voted on which apps could have the greatest impact on science. We actually had a tie and decided to keep the binary going and include 11 apps to make it a Top 10+1. These apps will now be presented to our worthy judges to determine the overall winner, to be announced November 30th. Our expert judges are: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

There were so many great apps, that we also decided to throw in three honorable mentions, who didn’t quite make it into the Top 10+1, but were crowd pleasers. See below the Top 10+1 to find out who made it to the honorable mention list.

More details on the Top 10+1 apps and the Binary Battle are up on our API developer portal, so check that out. And without further ado, here are the Top 10+1 apps…  (more…)

This is the fourth and final part announcing the top 40-ish Apps entered into the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. To see the first batch of apps, check out Day One. And Day Two with the second batch is here. And Day Three is here.

As a reminder, the top 10 apps will be announced in two weeks and the overall winners will be announced November 30th

Now, in order of entry received date, the final batch of apps to benefit science: (more…)

This is the second of four parts announcing the top 40-ish Apps entered into the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. To see the first batch of ten apps, check out Day One. Check back tomorrow for the next batch of 10 apps.

As a reminder, the top 10 apps will be announced in two weeks and the overall winners will be announced November 30th

Now, in order of entry received date, the second batch of 10 out of 40 apps to benefit science: (more…)

The Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle to create applications that benefit science is now 30 days in. While more than 1000 developers are now using Mendeley’s APIs, we’re going to mention the 40-or-so official entries into the Binary Battle. This will be a four part series, in which about 10 apps are revealed in each segment. Check back tomorrow for the next 10 apps.

We’ll reveal the Top 10 apps in two weeks. The Top 10 apps will go on to be judged by a panel of experts: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

Winners announced November 30th!

Now, in order of entry received date along with the developer descriptions, here are the first 10 of 40-ish: (more…)

Born 1834 in Yorkshire, John Venn was the 8th Venn to have a college education, mostly because his family held a pretty high status in the Christian church. As you probably know, until relatively recently, higher education was mostly a function of the church. As such, he probably enjoyed quite a few privileges and opportunities that the common man didn’t have access to at the time. One can only wonder what Venn would have thought of the way the world is today, where the stereotypical liberal college professor is agnostic, at best. Would he be thrilled at the trend towards opening access and democratizing research, or would be be horrified at the secular “barbarians at the gates”?

Whatever the case, we’re thrilled he formulated his theory of symbolic logic, as we can now use the concept of a Venn diagram to explain concepts such as: (more…)

At Mendeley, we took the inspiration for our name from Gregor Mendel, so it’s only proper that we would take a moment to recognize him on this day, the 189th anniversary of his birth. There’s also been a lot of attention given to the use and misuse of the word hacker in the news recently, so we also wanted to take a step back and recognize that creative spark and that terminal curiosity that drives people like Mendel to study obscure phenomena until they get to the hidden universal truths found within. (more…)

Educational researchers on Mendeley are a diverse bunch. While there’s definitely a technology flavor to the readership, each subdiscipline has its distinct literature without as much overlap as we’ve seen in other fields. That said, there were some common favorites. A paper on digital natives (and why the concept isn’t that useful) was one of the top papers across nearly all categories. If you want to hear more about this, Jess Mezei from Teachers College at Columbia, will be leading a free session on Mendeley for Educational research on July 19th at 2 PM EDT. Sign up here. Here’s the 5 most common papers: (more…)

With the Mendeley for Life Scientists webinar coming up on Thursday, I thought I would take a look at the readership stats for Biological Sciences. Biological Sciences has long been our biggest discipline, and having done my doctoral work in the Life Sciences, I knew this would be interesting. Overall, researchers in bioinformatics contributed most strongly to the most read papers, along with the older disciplines of micro- and molecular biology. Regardless of discipline, however, it’s clear that the days of toiling away in isolation to thoroughly study one gene are over. Today, it’s all about huge consortia and massive data. Here’s what I found: (more…)