Mendeley Blog

Citing research is about to get a whole lot easier.

William — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:06:09 +0000

The most laborious part of any research paper for me, and probably for many of you, is making sure that the references are formatted in the proper style. Is the title supposed to be in italics? Do I need a period or a comma here? It has always seemed like exactly the kind of thing that a computer should be able to do for me, and with Mendeley it can. Mendeley uses a system for formatting references called the Citation Style Language (CSL), which is sort of like HTML, but for citations. With Mendeley, you simply tell your word processor what citation style you want (picking from a library of thousands of styles) and our word processor plugin handles the rest.

On sharing research and the value of peer-review: Mendeley’s response to #SOPA and the Research Works Act.

William — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:05:36 +0000

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.

Announcing the Mendeley Institutional Edition – powered by Swets

William — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:18:00 +0000

The new year brings some big news! We've partnered with Swets, a subscription management company, to create the Mendeley Institutional Edition. This tool will allow librarians and institutions to connect their collection directly to researchers, aid collaboration among students, professors, and colleagues, and see the impact of the institution's research output. Within their institutional profile, librarians can assist their users in a number of ways:

Guest post: Jan Velterop – Putting the public back in publication.

William — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:54:58 +0000

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.

No time to learn new software? Let us teach you! New webinars for librarians and professors on 12/13 and 12/14.

William — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:51:20 +0000

If you're like most people I know, you'd like to keep up with technology, but you just don't have the time to sit down and spend a few hours learning how to use a new application. We understand. Give us an hour on the 13th or 14th and we'll get you up and running, so you can enjoy the productivity enhancement with minimal time investment. There will be two sessions, both at 2 PM EST on December 13 & 14. The first session will focus more on topics relevant to librarians, while the second one is designed for researchers in academic institutions. Both sessions will be introductory and suitable for folks with no prior experience, but will also give updates on getting the most out of newly released features. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions you'll be able to ask them during the event. We’ll discuss topics such as:

Winners of the first Binary Battle Apps for Science Contest

Jason Hoyt — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:00:08 +0000

We, along with PLoS, have been overwhelmed by the huge response that academics and the developer community have given to open up science. When we announced this contest to develop science applications on top of the Mendeley and PLoS platforms last March, we were not totally sure that anyone would even be interested. Boy, were we wrong! Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and one of five all-star judges, said this about the Binary Battle - “I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It's time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?” Mendeley launched the API platform in April of 2010 with the hope that it would 1) spur innovation in the science ecosystem and 2) send a signal to others that opening up data benefits everyone. To date, more 1000 developers have applied for API keys to build on top of that data. With the Binary Battle announcement, we hoped to carry open science further and by all accounts we did. Today we announce the winners of the 2011 Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle.

When publishing a research paper, it’s best to be sure.

William — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:23:54 +0000

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:

Calling all Librarians! Questions about Mendeley? Join us for a free webinar and Q&A on 2011-11-22 at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST

William — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:46:26 +0000

Calling all librarian and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we'll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you'll be able to ask them during the event. We’ll discuss topics such as:

Join us for Mendeley for Professors 2011-11-22 at 9 AM PST / 12 noon EST

William — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:21:23 +0000

If you're like most professors I know, you'd like to keep up with technology, but you just don't have the time to sit down and spend a few hours learning how to use a new application. We understand. Give us 40 minutes of your time on the 22nd and we'll get you up and running, so you can enjoy the productivity enhancement with minimal time investment. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we'll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you'll be able to ask them during the event.

Your chance to decide the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle winner

Jason Hoyt — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:02:35 +0000

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 [...]