Branden is our VP Product, known online by the mysterious alias of “omphe”.  To pronounce it, he explains, imagine being hit in the gut with a sack full of marshmallows.

How long have you been with Mendeley for?
Since May 2012

Where did you work before coming to Mendeley ?
I was a tech contractor so I’ve really worked just about everywhere:  AMEE, Imano, Dennis Publishing, Capita, HomeServe etc, etc. But my first career was as a dancer and I toured the world working with Rambert Dance Company, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet and more.

What made you apply for a job at Mendeley?
Paul Föckler and I met at a Scalability unconference at the Guardian in 2010.  I was talking a lot about delivery and scaling technical team management in some of the sessions and we had a brief talk about the growth that Mendeley was going through. Fast forward to last year, and he approached me about the opening for Product leadership.

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
I’d like to think that I’ve had a good impact on the transparency of our direction and priorities since I’ve arrived.  I’ve really been pushing for radical transparency around all of our choices of what we’ll develop for users and what everyone is working on at any given week.  We’ve got much greater visibility around the planned work ahead and David Lee and the insight/analytics team have made great progress on showing how we are performing against our commitments. But the big change is how much the team has grown and the recent momentum we’ve been picking up as we start moving in sync. There’s a lot more collaboration going on and this is going to result in some great improvements to the Mendeley user experience.

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
I get to work with some very clever people who are extremely passionate about what they want in the product. And the food on Leather Lane.

Do you have any pets?
I’ve got a lovely old border collie named Ruby who’s been my pal for 11 years now. She’s stuck with me through some pretty big life changes and always kept me moving on some pretty ambitious outdoor pursuits.  She’s getting a little slower in the mountains, but we’ll be out for an adventure as long as we can still get out there.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
I’ve never been particularly attached to specific websites, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t survive without the app Pocket.  I have such a steady stream of links and posts flooding my attention every day and I love being able to import them to Pocket and catch up without distraction when I’m travelling.  We’d do well, to make our mobile app fill the same role in researchers lives and I think Steve Dennis has been doing an amazing job of taming the flood of research articles for researchers on the go.

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
I dreamt of being an astronomer for a long while and I spent many a cold winter evening steaming up my backyard telescope while staring down the jittery craters of the moon. My enthusiasm died a bit when I discovered the central role of maths in modern astronomy and the realisation that telescope time was a rare and scarce commodity. Then I fancied being a doctor until a field trip to a pathology lab full of oversized livers and sliced cadavers put me off too.  And mountaineering had a big draw to me, despite growing up in a relatively flat part of the States. But I had been in a ballet studio from the age of six, so by my teens it was becoming pretty clear to me that I had a future and calling to be onstage and I grabbed that opportunity.  Dancers really need to be in a company as an apprentice by the time they’re 17-18, so I left home at 17 to follow my dream.

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
Patience.  Life is short and I’m on the third act of my second career.  But if you always rush, you miss the richness of what you have right now.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
I’m terrible about starting many books at once and always have several things on the go:

- The Art of the Start & Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki : I love Kawasaki’s distilled and lucid approach to startup business
- Data Visualisation : I’ve been learning Processing.org to keep my programming chops up and to scratch some visualisation itches I’ve had
- Think Stats : I work with some incredibly smart people at Mendeley and its disrespectful not to understand and wield some more rigorous statistical skills
- Bandit Algorithms for website optimisation : I want to start pushing our behavioural testing here and there are some great algorithms in this text
- Insanely Simple : The Apple approach to product and development is focussed and successful. An awesome look at their approach.
-  Welsh 3000 Ft challenges: I’m under the impression that I’ll get fit enough to compete this gruelling 29 miler in Snowdonia this year.  We’ll see
- Goedel, Escher, Bach : I’m stuck a bit on this, but its a fascinating blend of art, science and philosophy

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
We’d stop destroying this incredible planet we live on in the pursuit of passing desire.  I spend a good deal of time on glaciers at high altitude and have seen first-hand how quickly our climate is warming.  I just can’t fathom why we’d allow this to happen, just to preserve our privilege of driving our lazy butts to go shopping.

Favourite hobby?
I code and make things whenever I get the chance and having kids is giving me great excuses to do that in spades.  My daughter and I are building robots with Lego and Arduino these days.  Go #dadops.

Favourite food/drink?
I am a bit of a sucker for Pizza.  And with Maletti so close up the road, its hard to resist.

Favourite film?
Blade Runner remains my enduring favourite.  Since becoming a father, I see less film in the cinema than I used to, but I’m getting to rediscover all the great kids films.  My daughter Bella and I love the “Old Bamboo” number from Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang.  Plus Pixar can do no wrong. (Except Cars, which was nothing but wrong.  Let’s never speak of it again.)

Three things you would put in Room 101
Plastic waste
Sticking plasters in swimming pools
People who don’t make eye contact or return a friendly “Hello” when you pass and greet them.

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give
unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it
be and why?

I’d get everyone to stop messing about with genetic modification.  I mean, c’mon, we’re just thinking small!  Glow in the dark mice?  Pest resistant grain!  Give me a flat-chested, eight legged chicken and I’ll show you more Sunday roast than you could shake a drumstick at.

Oh, and cancer of course.

Photo Courtesy of J. Durham

A much talked-about book has recently raised an interesting subject: Is there science behind monsters, and our enduring fascination with them? Stories about scary mythical creatures are everywhere and have been around for as long as people have been able to tell stories and create these mythologies. Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s bite: the science of monsters explores not only the history of how monsters were created, but offers explanations of how natural science could have sparked the ideas for some creatures such as the Minotaur, Medusa, dragons and the golem.

The book’s author Matt Kaplan is a science journalist who believes there are concrete reasons why we invent creatures like zombies and aliens. For example, one explanation behind the legend of the Minotaur is that around the time it surfaced in Crete the island was suffering from a series of violent earthquakes, which would have produced formidable growling noises from deep within the earth. This could very well have been imagined as coming from the bull-headed beast. Other amalgamated creatures like the griffin were perhaps inspired by finding bones in tar pits.

The book is written for a popular audience, but it gives an interesting account of the origins and evolution of these monsters.  We’d certainly be interested to hear if any Mendeley users have come across this subject in their own research, and what your thoughts are on the relationship between science and myths. Let us know!

The Public Library of Science, the Wellcome Trust, and Google recently announced the Accelerating Science Award Program. If you know someone who has applied or reused scientific research in an innovative way to advance science, medicine, or technology, you can nominate them for an ASAP award. The goal of ASAP is to reward people for publishing and re-using open access research and also to gather compelling use cases for open access.

This program has major support from publishers, funders, and the tech community and they have put up some serious prize money – $30,000 for each of three winners. The nomination period opened May 1 and runs through June 15. Potential nominees may include individuals or teams of scientists, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, public health workers, students, or anyone else, as long as they have reused open access research in a innovative way. The winners will be announced during Open Access Week in October 2013 in Washington, DC at an event hosted by SPARC and the World Bank. Mendeley is assisting by publicizing the event and gathering nominations, and Creative Commons, along with several other library organizations, publishers, and research organizations are also sponsoring the event.

More information is available at http://asap.plos.org/

Scholars looking to publish in one of the approximately 30,000 peer reviewed scholarly journals (per Ulrich’s) have a big problem on their hands. They have to prepare the text of their manuscript according to the style specified by the journal, process the images as specified by the journal, prepare the necessary disclosures, deposit datasets into the appropriate repositories, and do a host of other activities according to their field, and then every citation must be written in a specific format that is (often trivially) different for every one of the approximately 2000 publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly content. As if doing the research isn’t hard enough!

Slowly, ever so slowly, technology is changing this practice. Read more »

Rosario is a Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead here at Mendeley, and she’s been with us pretty much from the start, nearly 4 years! So we catch up with her to ask what it was like back then, what’s changed, and what makes her stick around!

Do you have any nicknames?
Many, but the most recent one is Rosie

Where did you work before coming to Mendeley?
Before moving to London I was working at the University of Seville for RedIRIS which is the Spanish National Technology Foundation.

What made you apply for a job at Mendeley?
The company was young with an interesting and really ambitious goal. I
always wanted to be part of something big and Mendeley seemed to have a
lot of potential.

When you started working here, were things like you expected?
To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I do remember being really
scared of speaking English, as at that time wasn’t very good, and I was
really quiet… That’s not really happening any more! Good times
though…

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
A lot! When I joined we were like 10-12 people if I remember correctly.
I’ve moved offices once and desks… I can’t even remember how many
times now! There’s been times I’ve arrived to the office after holidays
and not recognised half of the people there, but that’s always fun! They
look as confused as I do

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
The people I work with, without any doubt. I love my team! What we’re
building is amazing and is helping a lot of researchers to make this
world better! That’s what gets me out of bed every day.

Do you have any pets?
My family has 2 little cute dogs (smooth fox terriers) in Spain – I pretty much love all animals, but I have a special soft spot for sausage dogs, they’re just too cute.

Who would be invited to your perfect dinner party?
The Monty Pythons, Tchaikovsky, Chris O’Dowd, Einstein, Freddy Mercury and all the people I love! The more the merrier.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
Soundcloud and Grooveshark

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
I changed my mind a lot actually… First, like my mum, a chemist, so I could make my own potions – then an engineer, like my dad, who I consider one of the smartest people I know. And then finally, a pianist, but it was too late for that when I had to decide!

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
Being musically gifted would be amazing. I’d love if I could play the piano.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
I tend to have a few books in the pipeline and I read them as my mood goes – reading a few techie books, a few comic books (Maus, Saga) and some others…

What was the first record you ever bought?
I think it was No Need to Argue by The Cranberries.

What music is on your iPod at the moment?
A lot. Around 300 playlists and nearly 9k tracks on my Spotify… I pretty much listen to everything, but lately what keeps me going is Pretty Lights.

Favourite video game/hobby?
My favourite video game of all time is Final Fantasy VII. My favourite hobby, without any doubt: listening to music and dancing.

Favourite food/drink?
Serrano ham, french fries, cheese / Coca Cola, a nice wine and Hendricks!

Favourite film?
Difficult to choose… I never get tired of Finding Nemo, A Clockwork Orange, Moulin Rouge or The Notebook.

Favourite place in the world?
Any sunny solitary beach does it for me, really. Maracaipe in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil would be my current favourite.

Three things you would put in Room 101
Rude/mean people, politicians, Internet trolls.

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it be and why?

Cancer. Unfortunately, I’ve had to see a lot of my loved ones dying and suffering from it.

Victor Henning, Mendeley Co-Founder, speaks at the ScienceBusiness Awards 2012 in Brussels (Photo by ScienceBusiness)

The existing Mendeley offering will continue to be free, so that we can continue to grow our user base as we have in the past, and we will also integrate Mendeley into Elsevier’s existing offerings like ScienceDirect or Scopus to increase their value. This actually means that we’re now under less short term pressure to monetize Mendeley’s individual users. When we were an independent start-up, we had to think about charging for every new or additional feature, in order to get to break even. Now, we can think more about the long term again.

For example, this enabled us to double our users’ storage space for free immediately after the Elsevier announcement. We had previously also planned to make the sync of highlights & annotations in our forthcoming new iOS app a premium feature – today, we decided instead that it will be free for all users, and thus also free for all third-party app developers to implement. And, as mentioned above, we are currently reviewing our collaboration features to see if we can expand them for free, too.

Academia has a reputation for being a bit of a closed world, a walled garden of knowledge where secrets are jealously guarded. But the truth is that collaboration is at the very heart of research and scientific discovery, and that for science to advance, researchers need to get together, compare notes, disagree, and have their ideas challenged and built upon by others. Often this happens naturally – like in the cafeteria where PhD students will chat about their projects – but in such a hyper-specialized environment, chances are that people who share your particular research interests cannot be found in the same institution or even the same country. What then?

In the same way that social media has revolutionised personal and professional communication and created dynamic global conversations, platforms like Mendeley now bring academics together in groups formed around those research interests, and the implications of that are tremendous for making science more open and accelerating the pace of discovery.This is why the team here at Mendeley is particularly interested in gaining genuine, real-time insight into research collaboration.

Mendeley is involved in several research projects. Particularly fruitful has been an on-going exchange of researchers and Mendeley staff between our London HQ and the Know-Center at Graz University of Technology in Austria. All projects aim to contribute to the improved use of the wealth of Mendeley data for the benefit of our users and the scientific community in general.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this recent investigation of research collaboration started as a Hack Day project between Mendeley staff and a visiting researcher from the Know-Center/TU Graz in the context of the TEAM project (http://team-project.tugraz.at) which is coordinated by the Knowledge Management Institute of the TU Graz. Sebastian Pöhlmann (Insights and Analytics Manager) and Piotr Drozd (Community and Business Intelligence Analyst) teamed up with Peter Kraker (PhD student, Know-Center/TU Graz) to visualise cross-country collaboration on the Mendeley platform.

An interactive map has been created that aims to shed some light into the intensity of international research collaboration across different countries. Considering that using Mendeley groups is optional for our users, we are excited to have data on 113 countries. For each of those we show the continent, the rank by user count, the number of connected countries and the proportion of foreign (= international) connections.

By browsing the map or making a selection from the list, you can visualise the connections between researchers for any given country. A connection between two countries is established if at least one of each country’s researchers are members of the same Mendeley group. Of the over 200,000 research groups on Mendeley, we’ve selected private groups with at least two members, as that tends to be the most collaborative group type. Our staff is also very active on the platform so we’ve further excluded groups owned by Mendeley staff  and connections where Mendeley staff are involved. We have further excluded countries with less than 10 total connections.

Browsing the map and the data has produced some interesting insights:

• Among BRICS countries, China, India and Russia have a high proportion of international connections whereas Brazil and South Africa seem somewhat more internally focused
• Generally speaking, North America, Europe, and Australia are very well connected, whereas Asia and South America are somewhat lagging behind.
• There are a few small countries that are very internationalized: Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, and Denmark. Interestingly, these countries are also at the top of the KOF Index of Globalization: http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/static/pdf/rankings_2012.pdf

This is early days, but we hope that by learning more about how our users collaborate with each other, we can continue to develop the best tools to help them work even more efficiently. And by sharing some of the insights on Mendeley Labs we want to contribute our part of the picture to the general knowledge of how research works.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. What does collaboration mean to you and how would you go about measuring and visualizing it?

We wanted to let you know that we’ve made some changes to give our user community a better Mendeley experience. From now on all personal and Mendeley Institutional Edition accounts (apart from the ones that already have unlimited storage) will get a lot more personal library space for storing documents. Here’s how it works:

• Free plan users who currently get 1GB of storage will now get 2GB
• Plus plan and MIE users who have 2GB will now get  5GB
• Pro plan users’ limit will increase from 5GB to 10GB

This applies to all new and existing Mendeley users, and you don’t need to do anything, the new limits should already be in place on your accounts.

And for our dedicated community of Mendeley Advisors all around the world, we’ve also added an extra bonus: Each Advisor will receive – in addition to the increased personal library space – a Team package with 20GBs of group space and an unlimited number of groups with up to 10 collaborators each. This Team package is currently worth £59 ($74) a month, and is something that our community has been asking for, so we’re really pleased to make this available!

Mendeley is a collaborative platform, and we’re always looking at ways to make that collaboration easier, so although we’re only giving these enhanced group features to our advisors at the moment, we’re looking at ways to extend those benefits to all our users in the near future, so watch this space!

In the meantime let us know in the comments below what you think about the upgrades, and if you have any questions as always you can get in touch with support@mendeley.com

Today we are excited to announce that Mendeley is joining Elsevier!

You might already have heard some rumors and speculation about this in the past few weeks. We hope you’ll understand that we couldn’t address the rumors head-on until there was some actual news to share with you. Now that the union is official, we would like to take some time to explain how it will benefit Mendeley’s and Elsevier’s users, the research community in general, as well as address some of the questions you may have.

The most important things first: very little will change for you as a Mendeley user. In fact, Mendeley is only going to get better for you. For starters, we are doubling everyone’s storage space at no cost. Your free Mendeley account now comes with 2GB, Mendeley Plus and MIE accounts get upgraded to 5GB, and Mendeley Pro accounts to 10GB. There will always be a free version of Mendeley, and our functionality will continue to improve, now even faster than before. We will focus on what has made Mendeley a success in the first place: ensuring that everything we do makes our users’ lives easier and listening closely to your needs. Your data will still be owned by you, we will continue to support standard and open data formats for import and export to ensure that data portability, and – as explained recently – we will invest heavily in our Open API, which will further evolve as a treasure trove of openly licensed research data. Our vision continues to be to make science more collaborative and open, and now we will work towards this vision with the support of the world’s largest science publisher.

Elsevier’s resources, partnerships, and reach in the academic, library, and professional community will enable us to accelerate our progress towards our vision. Our team will expand significantly over the next few years. Elsevier’s Scopus and ScienceDirect platforms will become seamlessly interoperable with Mendeley, creating a central discovery, workflow, and collaboration network for the global research community. Here’s Elsevier’s comments about what they expect from the partnership.

On a more personal note, let me also explain why we chose to team up with Elsevier at this point. Mendeley had just raised a significant round of funding from existing and new investors, with more investors wanting to join. Also, Mendeley’s revenues from our individual and team premium accounts, as well as our new Mendeley Institutional Edition, had tripled over the past year. We could have continued on our path independently, yet we felt that the opportunity to give our users access to better content, more data, and faster development was just too exciting to pass up.

Of course, we are aware that – especially in the past year – the academic community has criticized Elsevier for some of its policies and positions. Our own relationship with Elsevier has been conflicted at times. Elsevier is a multi-faceted company with over 7000 employees, so it is impossible to put them into a single box. We were being challenged by some parts of the organization over whether we intended to undermine journal publishers (which was never the case), while other parts of the organization were building successful working relationships with us and even helped to promote Mendeley.

For example, when Elsevier decided to shut down its social bookmarking service, the 2collab team collaborated with us to build a data import tool, then recommended their users to migrate to us, the upstart competitor. When we co-hosted (together with Nature Publishing Group and the British Library) the Science Online London Conference to talk about Open Science, Elsevier was one of our first sponsors. And when we launched our Open API, Elsevier was the first major publisher to embrace our data and build a Mendeley Readership App for their application platform.

Time and time again, Elsevier struck us as one of the most innovative and tech-savvy publishers out there. They have launched challenges to make research papers more interactive and useful, improve the process and incentives of peer review, and build knowledge discovery and visualization tools for the life sciences. They provide tools for exploring and unearthing connections between researchers and contribute to the ORCID author profile initiative. Like us, the Elsevier Labs team is researching semantics, taxonomies, natural language processing, data visualization, and big data analytics. Lastly, Elsevier’s applications platform mirrors our own ambition of enabling developers to create unique new research tools.

Elsevier is a large, complex organization – to say the least! While not all of its moves or business models have been universally embraced, it is also a hugely relevant, dynamic force in global publishing and research. More importantly, we have found that the individual team members – the employees, editors, innovators, and tool developers we’ve worked with – all share our genuine desire to advance science. This is why we’re thrilled to join Elsevier and help shape its future.

In sum, the overlap between Elsevier’s and our vision has always been remarkable. Combining Elsevier’s content, analytics tools, and long-standing publisher/society relationships with Mendeley’s collaboration platform and social data will enable both of us to develop amazing new services that will make your research life easier.

I know you’ll have a lot of questions, so please find some additional information here. If you’re still skeptical about whether this will be a good thing for you as a user, we hope to convince you by our actions over the next few weeks and months. Good things are about to happen!

Thank you for all of your support, and thanks especially to our incredible team of Mendeley Advisors!

Jan, Paul, Victor, and Team Mendeley

Will Mendeley still be free?

Yes! There will always be a free version of Mendeley.

Will Mendeley continue to develop new features?

Yes – we will even become faster, as having access to Elsevier’s resources, partnerships, and reach in the academic, librarian, and professional R&D community will allow us to accelerate our development. Please head over to our feedback forum to vote for your favourite feature suggestions.

What will change for Mendeley’s users?

For starters, we are doubling everyone’s storage space at no cost. Your free Mendeley account now comes with 2GB, Mendeley Plus and MIE accounts get upgraded to 5GB, and Mendeley Pro accounts to 10GB. In the future, we will also start offering you better access to content and additional data, e.g. citation metrics, from within the Mendeley interface.

What will change for users of SciVerse, Scopus, or ScienceDirect?

You can expect seamless interoperability with all of these tools: Exporting documents, references, and data to Mendeley will become much easier. Also, content in SciVerse, Scopus, and ScienceDirect will be enriched with Mendeley’s data, such as recommendations and readership statistics. Lastly, we will be considering special Mendeley premium upgrades for Elsevier customers.

Will there be changes to Mendeley’s premium packages or pricing?

Not in relation to this announcement – we are not planning any price increases to the premium/team packages we are offering today. Of course, we are always reviewing our premium offerings to ensure that they are affordable and meet our users needs, so they will continue to evolve over time.

What happens to my data in Mendeley?

Everything stays the same. You still own your data and can delete it at any point in time. You will always be able to import and export your data locally in standard formats (such as BibTex, RIS, and XML). Additionally, as has always been our policy, Mendeley will continue to offer you private and secure access to your data via our Open API, which means that you will never be tied to Mendeley’s tools and interfaces exclusively.

Will Mendeley continue to offer an Open API?

Yes. In fact, we are in the process further opening up our data and extending third-party developers’ capabilities – there will be more and better data to work with, under the Creative Commons CC-BY license, as before.

Will Mendeley continue to support Open Access and Open Science?

Yes. In fact, Elsevier are accelerating their Open Access initiatives as well.

Will Mendeley keep up its Advisor and Community Programmes?

Absolutely! We will remain as dedicated to our community as before – and Mendeley Advisors will receive a free Team Plan upgrade to enable them to share and collaborate with up to 10 colleagues. Consider the amazing opportunity we have: Mendeley now has access to the resources of the world’s leading science, technical, and medical publisher. We want to hear from you how best to leverage these resources to serve your needs.

Will Mendeley keep working with other publishers?

Yes, most definitely. Mendeley will not favour Elsevier content in our search and recommendation engine. Our discovery tools will remain focused on pointing you to the content that’s the most relevant to you, no matter the publisher or the journal. We will keep working with other publishers to ensure that their content is optimally discoverable and compliant with their terms within Mendeley.

What are Elsevier’s long-term plans for Mendeley?

Mendeley will become Elsevier’s central workflow, collaboration, and networking platform, while we continue on our mission of making science more open and collaborative.