The Open Science Summit brings together researchers, life science industry professionals, students, patients and other stakeholders to discuss the future of collaborative science and innovation. This year features in depth sessions on new models for drug discovery and clinical trials, personal genomics, the patent system, the future of scientific publications, and more. I went last year and made some good friends and learned a lot, so I would definitely recommend it to anyone involved in scientific research.

What: Open Science Summit When: Saturday and Sunday, October 22-23rd 2011 Where: Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

p.s. All attendees get a special thank you gift from Mendeley, and there will also be some fun extracurricular activities, so don’t miss this.

This post is the third post in a series of posts designed to introduce you to the new information organization, discovery, and retrieval concepts in Mendeley. In part 1 we discussed tags and filters and in part 2 we discussed the idea of search as an interface to your research. Today I’d like to talk a little about another feature that has become common to information organization and discovery tools – the activity feed.

The benefits of online research are obvious (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

Get your work noticed! Adding your publications to your profile helps get your work found. More and more often, people aren’t looking to journal table of contents or library catalogs when they search for research. They’re watching what their friends and colleagues bookmark on social networks or add to groups on Mendeley, and they’re searching Google Scholar. In order to get your work noticed, you need to be present where people are looking. There are a few ways you can do this, but like many things, just showing up counts for more than you would think. Simply having an account and connecting to your colleagues online can position you to get found more often, but also to find more interesting things you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. With hundreds of papers being published in my field every week, I couldn’t keep up using a pure search strategy.

(more…)

This post is the second in a series, looking back over the changes in information management over the past decade. Three major and interrelated developments are the move to querying databases of information as opposed to loading information from individual files, the practice of tagging bits of information as opposed to filing things in a hierarchical folder structure, and the representation of information as a temporal stream as opposed to a static page. This post is about the move to databases from filing systems, and how that improves your workflow. (more…)

We believe that we will change the world for the better. Yup, this exciting and glorious ambition is what keeps us going. But we also realize that we are not the only one sweating to make it happen. That’s exactly why it is such an honor to have placed first at the Guardian Activate Future Technologies Pitching Contest.

A panel of judges including Esther Dyson, Anil Hansjee, Stephen King, and George Coelho asked themselves, “which company is most likely to change the world for the better?” and the answer was Mendeley! Also today, Victor – alongside Google CEO Eric Schmidt and US Deputy Chief Technology Officer & Director of White House Open Government Initiative Beth Simone Noveck – gave a presentation at the Guardian Activate 2010 Summit.

Thank you everyone for supporting us (and yes, keep sending us your feedback)! Being recognized feels great and what we love even more is that a win like this allows us more opportunities to speak up about our progress and vision.

Speaking of progress, we reached just over 400,000 users and are approaching 30M research papers in our users’ libraries as of yesterday.

Now let the saga continue…

Academia-bound information management tools are not a new thing. But never have they been as widely or excitedly welcomed. Odd, it seems, for an industry ripe for collaboration. The enthusiasm is, in large part, due to Mendeley’s ease of use – but its longevity lies in the long-tail data that can be unearthed about who’s reading what, when and why.

- “Mendeley ‘most likely to change the world for the better’” by Josh Halliday, The Guardian

Are you working for a company or institution in the field of science, or do you want to reach the thought leaders in science online? We are looking for sponsorship partners for our Science Online London 2010 conference on 3-4 September (Fri/Sat) at the British Library in St Pancras, London. Last year, our sponsors included institutions and companies like the Royal Institution of Great Britain, CrossRef, NESTA, AAAS/Science, and BioData.

As a sponsor, you will gain exposure to key scientific bloggers, communicators and thought leaders. Given the nature of the audience, we anticipate plenty of media coverage and ‘buzz’ through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and blogs. The conference is a golden opportunity to demonstrate that your company is a supporter of such tools for scientific communication, and a chance to promote your brands, products and services to an audience of passionate communicators.

If you would like to participate as a sponsor of Science Online London 2010 please contact Lou Woodley (l.woodley@nature.com).

Co-hosted by:

In piphilology, one hundred thousand is the current world record for the number of digits of pi memorized by a human being (well, that’s according to Wikipedia). So, as happy as we are at Mendeley to have 100,000 users onboard, we regret to say that it is now beyond our limits for us to remember every single user on our site (but good to see that you keep on writing and helping to improve Mendeley). In the same week we crossed a second milestone of 8 million research articles uploaded to our database in less than a year. Currently Mendeley’s article database continues to expand as researchers, students and scientists from around the world upload, collaborate and share their research using Mendeley. In April 2009 we reached the 1 million article mark, which means the number of articles in our database has doubled in size every ten to twelve weeks. To give a little context: the world’s largest online research database by Thomson Reuters took 49 years to reach 40 million articles.

A big thank you to Techcrunch’s Sean O’Hear who wrote: “Mendeley could be the largest online research paper database by early 2010″ and James Glick from The Next Web who wrote: “Mendeley ‘the last.fm of research’ hits new heights”.

And congratulations to our growing community of users!

Image by Jorel314