Following last year’s successful “Science Blogging 2008” conference in London (see Victor’s blog post), we are happy to announce a slightly rebranded “Science Online London” as this year’s follow-up conference. The event will take place 22 August 2009 at the Royal Institution, London, and is co-hosted by Nature Network, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Mendeley. To accomodate for a wider range of topics (i.e. not only science blogging), we changed the name to “Science Online London”, and we encourage you to suggest topics for the programme.

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

As stated on the Science Online London webpage, “Topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifies and measuring the impact of research.” Subscribe to the newsletter, send us your ideas – and let us know if you want to sponsor the conference. We’re all very much looking forward to meeting you at the Royal Institution on 22 August!

Exciting news: Jason Hoyt, the founder of Ologeez (a semantic frontend for PubMed), is joining Mendeley! Jason holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. At the moment, he is still based in Palo Alto, but once the visa issues are sorted out, Jason will be joining us here in London as our new Research Director. TechCrunch broke the story today with a headline that made our geek hearts beat faster, comparing us to a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in London.

To get started, Jason wrote up his reasons for joining us, and how Mendeley can help change the Impact Factor. Over to him:

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Changing the Journal Impact Factor

Right, so the first thing I had to ask myself was “Why on earth would I move from San Francisco, leaving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.

Well, I’m not going to answer by talking about how great the team is or how enthusiastic the founders are about improving research, which is certainly all true. Rather, let’s take a real-world example of how the “tech” behind Mendeley is already making a difference with how we view the impact factors of research.

(more…)

Today we can announce another bit of news that makes us very happy! For a while, we’ve been looking for help in better engaging the academic community, involving it more in our roadmap decisions, and also understanding the needs of life scientists better. Consider this: We’re all social scientists, computer scientists and engineers here at Mendeley HQ, and we couldn’t pick this guy PubMed out of a police lineup.

Ok, I’m exaggerating (our next release of Mendeley Desktop, due next week, will enable manual PubMed ID lookups, and the next release after that will do PubMed lookups for all your PDFs automatically). However, the help we’ve been looking for has now arrived in the congenial, talented and Portuguese shape of Ricardo Vidal, author of My Biotech Life! You can see his picture on the top right, and his “silly microbe” design down on the left.

Ricardo will become our first “Community Liaison”. While continuing on with his graduate studies, he’ll also devote a few  hours each week to interacting with other researchers on the blogosphere, Twitter, and other social media on Mendeley’s behalf.

I first came across Ricardo’s blog around June last year, because he had written an article about his research paper management needs. So I left a comment pointing him to Mendeley, and he asked for a few invitation codes to the then-ongoing private beta for his readers. We were happy to give him twenty, which were gone only hours after Ricardo offered them on his blog! We loosely stayed in touch ever since and were grateful for the continued support he’s given us over time.

For this announcement, I asked Ricardo to briefly introduce himself and describe why he decided to join us as a Community Liaison and what his hopes for Mendeley were. Here are his answers:

Introduction
Let’s see… I’m currently concluding my Master of Engineering degree in Biological Engineering at the University of Algarve, in Southern Portugal. I’ve been blogging since 2006 at My Biotech Life and am also the co-founder of the DNA Network, a leading network of DNA-related blogs.  I also produce (sometimes silly) biotech graphics and logos from time to time.

Why I joined
Besides the fact that I am terrible at keeping my digital papers in order on my laptop or online, I believe that Mendeley represents not only a two-in-one solution for research paper management but also comprises another aspect that I consider of extreme importance, networking. The ability to contact and share your work with researchers alike is invaluable.

Hope/vision for Mendeley
Looking at the progress that has taken place since Mendeley’s launch, I can only hope that things keep evolving as they are now. The roadmap looks promising and the user feedback can only make it a better piece of software as time goes by.

As it has been stated, I also envision Mendeley to become the “Last.fm for Research Papers” where user statistics and networking play a vital part in research, by providing easier access and interaction to scientific information.

Are you looking for a research job?

A few days ago, William Gunn blogged about a fascinating idea for a paper recommendation engine and also described Mendeley’s role in it. His post then generated a lively discussion on FriendFeed.

Perhaps due to our relatively well-known affiliation with Last.fm, our idea for a research paper recommendation engine had always involved tags and collaborative filtering. But William brings up Pandora, another type of recommendation engine which doesn’t rely on critical mass, but on scoring music based on a certain set of dimensions.

So I was wondering, how feasible would such a human-scored recommendation engine be for research papers, and how could one do it? If one were to transplant the Pandora approach 1:1, one would have to find suitable dimensions on which to score papers – but what could those be? Epistemological position (e.g. positivist vs. constructivist), academic discipline, methods used? Or would you have to define a slightly different set of dimensions for each academic discipline? As opposed to music, where you can score tracks based on instrumentation, mood, tempo etc., I feel that it would be rather difficult to use this level of abstraction for research paper recommendations, but maybe I’m wrong.

Of course, you could think of tagging as a form of (binary) scoring, too, but without pre-defined dimensions. I thus remain convinced that tagging and collaborative filtering will be very good starting point for our recommendation engine. However, William’s suggestion made me think of an additional possibility.

Here’s what we might do: We have been planning to gradually add “Paper Pages” to the Mendeley site over the next few weeks. There will be one page for every paper in our database, containing the metadata, the abstract (if possible/available), some usage statistics about the paper, links to the publisher’s page (if available), and (later on) commenting functionality. We were also thinking about crowdsourcing approaches to enable users to correct mistakes in the metadata or merge duplicates.

Incorporating William’s suggestion, we could also give users the option to explicitly link paper pages to each other, and then say “this paper is related to this other paper because ___”. Two papers sharing the same tag may implicitly suggest a relation, but it might also be a case of a homonym – the same tag meaning two completely different things in different disciplines. An explicit link would solve this problem.

I didn’t have much time to fully think this through, and any further ideas would be appreciated!

Well, I’m stuck at the Toronto Airport because I missed my connecting flight to Raleigh, NC. At least I found an AC outlet for my laptop – now I’ve settled down on the floor with a splendid view overlooking… the toilet entrance. Thank you, Air Canada.

On a more positive note: I’ve been invited to join the Programme Committee of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science! Yeay! It will take place from 24-26 June 2009 in Cologne, Germany. The conference is organized and chaired by the NCeSS, which recently won the Research Information Network tender on the “Web 2.0 resources for researchers” project.

Here’s the Call for Papers for the conference – please note that the submission deadline (29 January) is approaching fast!

5th International Conference on E-Social Science

I just came across this, and it’s brilliant. Not least because our name, Mendeley, was partly taken from the discoverer of the periodic table. A team of chemists from the University of Nottingham set out to explain every single element in a brief, but very informative and funny, video: The Periodic Table of Videos.

The Hydrogen video, for example, largely consists of a guy named Pete blowing up balloons, and a frizzy-haired scientist explaining the reaction. My favourite moment comes at the end:

Frizzy-haired scientist: Deuterium gas, in all its properties, will be very similar to hydrogen. Of course it is denser, because it has a neutron as well as a proton, but it’s still much lighter than air. So, a deuterium balloon will still float up to the ceiling and make Pete look just as stupid as the hydrogen one.

Camera guy: But I was thinking more about fusing it, now that sounds like a really big explosion we could do at the back!

Frizzy-haired scientist: No, fusion reactors are way beyond what Pete can do. Unless he’s a lot cleverer than I think.

Here’s the video, but I encourage you to check out the entire website:

P.S. The guy who blows things up is Pete Licence, a lecturer in chemistry and chemical engineering, and the frizzy-haired scientist is Martyn Poliakoff, CBE, a research professor at the University of Nottingham.

Via total.pardo.

Happy New Year from everyone at Team Mendeley! We’re excited to be back from the holidays and buzzing with ideas. We’ve got a couple of newsworthy bits, but that’s for another post.

This one is about a research proposal we submitted in December, trying to get selected by the Research Information Network for a commissioned study on the “Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers” (Mendeley, anyone?). It was a joint effort with Gavin Baker/SPARC, Jonathan Gray/Open Knowledge Foundation, Niall Haslam/European Molecular Biology Lab, Liz Lyon/UKOLN and Cameron Neylon/Science and Technology Facilities Council. As the lone social scientist on the team, my main task would have been to oversee the empirical survey and conduct the statistical analysis and structural equation modelling.

Unfortunately for us, even though we were invited into the final round of presentations at RIN, our bid did not get selected. I can understand (and agree with) the reasoning that RIN gave us – they thought we had a great team and compelling methodology, but we hadn’t given as much thought to the nuts and bolts of the project management as they would have liked. Nonetheless, it was a great learning experience (Gavin has blogged about this, too), and I genuinely enjoyed working out the proposal with the other team members. Getting into the final round wasn’t too shabby either, considering that none of us had ever written a proposal for such a research tender.

Sincere congratulations to the winning team from NCeSS/University of Manchester and ISSTI/University of Edinburgh!

In the spirit of Web 2.0 collaboration and sharing, our team had planned to make our proposal (and had we been selected, our ongoing work and raw data) public for everyone to access and re-use. So here’s the proposal we submitted:

Tender: Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers

Oh dear, I’ve got a hard time keeping my eyes open, so I’ll just recount the facts. I’m sitting in my bed at the Latham Hotel, Philadelphia, where I arrived this afternoon (early-morning flight from London to Washington, then on with a regional jet). Not having slept very much last night, I felt like taking a nap right away, but I decided against it and took a 3-hour walk around downtown and Chinatown.

View from my hotel room

Chinese Friendship Gate

Chinatown Fire Brigade

Hello my name is… Jingumeicai??

City Hall

Rittenhouse Square

It was a good (if exhausting) start to the tour I’m about to take in the next ten days. Coinciding with the Mendeley beta 0.6.0 release early next week, I’ll be visiting a number of academic institutions along the East Coast. If you’re anywhere near and would like meet up, let me know!

Monday, Dec 1, I’ll pop in at Drexel University to talk to a librarian and hopefully manage to say hello to Jean-Claude Bradley.

Tuesday, Dec 2, I’ll be giving a demo of Mendeley at Princeton University. Afterwards it’s on to New York, where Thomas Krichel (founder of RePEc) has generously offered to let me stay at his place. Thank you, Thomas!

Wednesday, Dec 3, a demo at NYU, organised by Carol Hutchins (Head ot NYU’s Math Library) whom I got to know at the Science in the 21st Century conference a few weeks ago.

Thursday, Dec 4, I’ll take the Long Island Railroad to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. David Crotty (Executive Editor of the CSH Protocols) has kindly offered to take me on a brief tour of the lab, and also invited me to do an informal talk on Mendeley. Afterwards (and this is something I’m especially looking forward to) I’ll catch a ferry from Port Jefferson to cross the Long Island Sound, then travel on to New Haven.

Friday, Dec 5, a Mendeley demo at Yale. I’ve never been in New Haven, so I’ll probably stay there for Saturday as well and take in the atmosphere!

Sunday, Dec 7/Monday, Dec 8, I’ll be in Providence to meet Brandon King (and perhaps a librarian or two) at Brown University. Then, get a rental car and drive up to Hanover, NH. Update: Did a demo at Brown University’s Library on Monday morning!

Tuesday, Dec 9, a Mendeley demo at Dartmouth College. One of Dartmouth’s librarians, Ann Perbohner, recently named Mendeley the “Best Bet” for PDF Management – despite our still-early beta status! As you can imagine, we were happy as clams.

Wednesday, Dec 10, back down to Boston to have lunch with Aaron Swartz of OpenLibrary.org. Then catch a plane to Graz, Austria for a joint PhD students’ colloquium of the University of St. Gallen and my alma mater, the Bauhaus-University of Weimar. Update: Also managed to squeeze in a demo at MIT in the morning!

And that’s just my bit of the trip! At the same time, Jan will be in the Bay Area first, then fly to Indianapolis to demo Mendeley at the IEEE e-Science conference, also on Wednesday, Dec 10. We’ll certainly try to keep you posted with updates during the trip.

As a recent member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, I’m marveling at their events calendar which strikes me as hands down the best entertainment programme in London (if you’re into scientific talks, that is). Two of the four lectures I’ll be attending in the coming weeks are part of the members-only, black-tie “Friday Evening Discourses” that were started by Michael Faraday in 1826 – isn’t that amazing?

One of the talks that I’ll unfortunately have to miss (because I’m travelling to Germany) is this one next Monday, 20th October:

Murder in Mayfair

London is an epicentre of medical advancement, from Edward Jenner’s pioneering work on vaccination to the world’s first heart and lung transplant. But London is also a hotbed of disease and demise and this event will take a look at the notorious murders and strange deaths in the capital. [...].

London has a rich and gruesome history of untimely demises. From the recent past we have the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, only a few minutes’ walk from the Royal Institution, who was killed by a radioactive teapot. 18 years earlier, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was dispatched with a poison tipped umbrella by Waterloo Bridge.

Or how about this one on 4th November:

The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy

Gray’s Anatomy is probably one of the most iconic scientific books ever published: an illustrated textbook of anatomy that is still a household name 150 years since its first edition, known for its rigorously scientific text, and masterful illustrations as beautiful as they are detailed. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy tells the story of the creation of this remarkable book, and the individuals who made it happen.

Wonderful, isn’t it? So, in the spirit of peppering this blog with Edo period, medieval, and Japanese monster anatomy, here are some more highly rigorous anatomic drawings I just came across:

Via Gizmodo.

Long time no blog, indeed. I had wanted to write more about the numerous workshops and conferences I attended, but I didn’t get around to it because we’ve been very busy here at Mendeley HQ. Among other things, we’re planning a new release of Mendeley Desktop soon. Without giving too much away, it will include a few long-awaited and highly-requested new features. Stay tuned!

So I’ve been looking for a way to sum up my recent travels. With total disregard for Blaise Pascal’s famous quote “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”, I concluded that Haikus might be a solution. Here goes:

In Soton I sleep
on Ben’s futon which fails, my
talk is all woozy

Said futon

Listening to Yaroslav‘s talk

Moving on – my Science in the 21st Century haiku:

Waterloo WiFi
breaks during the demo yet
enthusiasm wins

Chad Orzel on Newtonian vs. Galileian science – our former landlord Michael Palin making another unexpected appearance

Collective mind-mapping exercise devised by Alex Pang

Panel with Steve Weinstein, Harry Collins, David Kaiser, Lee Smolin and impressively bescribbled blackboards

In short, I had a marvelous week at the Perimeter Institute. Thanks to Sabine for organizing such a great conference, to Mark and Eva for the many inspiring conversations, to Jen and Michael for inviting me over to dinner, to Chad, Simeon, John and Cameron for the nice evening at the brewery, to Katy for offering to help us develop data visualizations, to David and Paul for sharing their insights into the current US presidential election (and Paul giving me one of his Analog SF magazines so I’d have something to read on the plane), to Gerry for sharing his thoughts on social networking (and looking like Albert Einstein), and to Hassan for inviting me to contribute an essay about reputation systems in science to his upcoming book.