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…)

There’s a great discussion that’s been going on over the past couple weeks on the LIBLICENSE-L mailing list. I particularly liked what one of the participants, Jan Velterop (CEO, Acqknowledge) had to say, so I asked him if he would like to contribute a guest post and he graciously agreed: (more…)

Image via blackbeltjones

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending Science Hack Day with about 150 other scientists and hackers. It was an amazingly fun event with people from all over the world coming together to build cool, quirky, and otherwise awesome things over the span of a weekend. It’s a sort of high holy day for geeks like me, so I was especially thrilled that Mendeley was able to be a sponsor this year. It was also fun spending quality time with some of the PLoS developers and collaborating on a fun hack. Here’s some of the highlights: (more…)

Keeping with the Open Access week spirit, we’re taking this opportunity to show you how to publicly share your own research on Mendeley. Making it openly available for others to easily access means they are more likely to cite you in their own publications, and also allows your colleagues to build upon your work faster.

When you sign up for a Mendeley user account, a researcher profile is created for you. On this page, along with your name, academic status, and short bio, you will also see a section titled “Publications”. This section is where you can display work you’ve published or perhaps even work that’s not yet published.

So how do you add your publications to that list? Just drop your papers into the My Publications folder in Mendeley Desktop. Let me show you how, step by step. (more…)

Mendeley has some great events lined up for Open Access Week. William Gunn (Head of Academic Outreach) will be speaking at Open Science Summit the weekend of the 22nd, at the PLoS Open Access Week event with Heather Joseph on the 24th, at the UC Davis event on the 25th, and Mendeley NYC is hosting a online webcast with Pete Binfield (Managing Editor, PLoS) and Jason Hoyt (Research Director, Mendeley).

The Mendeley event will be conducted online via WebEx at 1 PM EDT on October 27.

Pete will discuss how the alternative metrics for impact that PLoS provides gives new insight into how OA content is used and shared. Jason will talk about how Mendeley built the world’s largest open catalog of research and why that presents a perfect use case for Open Access.

We will put up a recording of the session afterwards, so check this post or our Youtube channel.

Date: Thursday, Oct 27th 2011 Time: 1:00 PM EDT Presenter: Pete Binfield and Jason Hoyt

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…)

It isn’t to obtain tenure. And it isn’t for money. Although to some, that is what publishing has become. The rationale for why we publish is (should be) to communicate results to as great an audience as possible and advance our understanding of the world around us. At Mendeley, we started to wonder how we could help communicate results and bring new models to the publication ecosystem. We think that Open Access content, where the full-text is readily accessible to all, will be the standard communication model in the future. And as such, we are rethinking how we shape our discovery algorithms. (more…)

The Public Library of Science, the world’s largest Open Access publisher, has joined Mendeley in co-sponsoring the Binary Battle, the contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and Mendeley’s API’s. This brings the prize money to be won up to $16,000 plus other cool gifts and the opportunity to get your entries in front of a panel of influential judges from technology, media and science.

What is the Binary Battle?

The Mendeley & PLoS Binary Battle is a contest to build the coolest, most popular, and most useful application using Mendeley’s open database of over 90 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations or PLoS’s Search API which provides PLoS content for your desktop, web, or mobile application. You can find the full details on the Mendeley API Binary Battle page or read the announcement from PLoS. (more…)

We didn’t quite make it in time for OA week, but I hope we’ll be forgiven, because we have an AWESOME feature that we just quietly launched. It’s now possible to filter the 27 million canonical documents in the Mendeley research catalog for articles published in Open Access journals. (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.
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