This is the third of four parts 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. Check back tomorrow for the final batch of 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 third batch of apps to benefit science: (more…)

A preview release of Mendeley Desktop 1.1 is available.  This release includes several performance improvements in the Microsoft Word plugins alongside a number of stability and usability enhancements.

You can download the preview from the right-hand side of the downloads page.

You can give us feedback on this release in the feedback forum, the comments in this post or via our support form.

• Improved the performance of inserting citations and refreshing documents using the Word plugins (these mostly benefit the Microsoft Word for Windows plugin, but there have also been improvements to the Mac Word plugin).
• Pressing the ‘Delete’ key now removes the selected document from the current collection, instead of moving it to the trash. Pressing Shift+Delete moves the document to the trash and Ctrl+Shift+Delete removes it completely.
• Folders in the left-hand pane are now collapsed on startup.
• When a pair of documents are marked as not being duplicates in the ‘Check for Duplicates’ tool, that decision is remembered on the computer on which it was made.

• Fixed a problem which could allow multiple copies of Mendeley to run at once.
• Fixed Bibtex sync not updating the corresponding Bibtex files when documents are added to or removed from folders.
• (Mac) Reduced watched folders resource usage and fixed crash when watching a folder containing a large number of sub-folders.
• (Windows) Fixed Mendeley not being able to close Word automatically when needed on 64bit Windows.

Compatibility

• There are no compatibility changes from the previous release.  In the event of problems with the 1.1 preview, you can revert back to 1.0.

Artist, Scientist, and Mendeley user E*phi drew this cool manga-influenced doodle, which of course caught our eye because it’s got a Mendeley logo embedded right in it!

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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.
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We are honoured to announce that our Keynote Speakers for Science Online London 2010 are Lord Martin Rees, Evan Harris and Aleks Krotoski.

Widely acknowledged as one of the world’s preeminent cosmologists, Lord Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Trinity College, Cambridge – in addition to being a prolific author and speaker. He has received countless awards for his varied contributions to his field, and was this year elected to deliver the Reith Lectures for the BBC. Billed by TED as ‘one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity within the cosmos’, Lord Rees has also served on many bodies here in the UK and abroad, dealing with education and international collaboration in science.

Evan Harris was a doctor before entering politics, eventually becoming the Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Minister in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and Shadow Minister for Science until May this year. He remains a strong voice for science within Parliament.

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. For her PhD in Social Psychology, she examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She writes regularly for the Guardian and the Observer, and hosts a technology podcast called Tech Weekly. Just this February, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC Two – a documentary about the social history of the Web.

This will again be an amazing conference, aimed at changing the face of science. We are still a month away from the conference and have few tickets left, so you need to move fast if you want to join us.

You can follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf (comment with hashtag #solo10).

If you have opened Mendeley Desktop since yesterday, you will have noticed that we have a new major release available and ready for auto-update.

Among the new features and improvements we would like to mention the re-designed Document Details pane on the right-hand side.

Also new to this release is the ability to upgrade your Mendeley account. By upgrading your current free account (which will always be free!) to one of our premium options, you have access to more Web space for your personal and shared collections and the possibility to collaborate with larger groups.

Overall, there have been a lot of improvements made both on the interface and functional level with clearer dialogs and information display. For our Mac users, there have been quite a few UI improvements too and the Cmd+H shortcut properly hides the window!

This release includes a few bug fixes, improvements on existing features such as faster syncing and better sticky notes, and introduces some important new features. The release notes can be seen here.

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please e-mail support.