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?

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.

As of today, Mendeley has two million users! To mark the occasion, we have published the Global Research Report - a unique analysis of two million scholars’ research activity in relation to economic indicators and research productivity. The Global Research Report draws on the unique usage statistics of Mendeley’s desktop- and cloud-based research collaboration platform, which is used by academics in the sciences and humanities in over 180 countries to manage their research workflows. (more…)

Imagine the rich ecosystem of third-party Facebook and Twitter apps, now emerging in the domain of science. More than 240 applications for research collaboration, measurement, visualization, semantic markup, and discovery – all of which have been developed in the past year – receive a constant flow of data from Mendeley. Today, Mendeley announced that the number of queries to its database (termed “API calls”) from those external applications had surpassed 100 million per month.

Akin to a “Wikipedia for academic data”, the information fueling this ecosystem has been crowdsourced by the scientific community itself. Using Mendeley’s suite of document management and collaboration tools, in just three years its global community of 1.9 million researchers has created a shared database containing 65 million unique documents and covering – according to recent studies – 97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. Commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elseviers contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents respectively, but access to their databases is licensed to universities for tens of thousands of dollars per year.

In contrast, Mendeley’s database is freely accessible under a Creative Commons license, and it is the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data anywhere on the web, on mobile devices, or on the desktop. Moreover, because Mendeley’s data is crowdsourced, it has a unique social layer: Each document comes with anonymized real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. Mendeley’s API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.

The most popular apps built on Mendeley’s platform fulfill academia’s need for faster and more granular metrics of scientific impact: ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org display a researcher’s or a labs’ real-time impact on the academic community, while Mendeley itself recently announced the first sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions around the globe. Hojoki pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. OpenSNP, winner of Mendeley’s $10,001 Binary Battle prize, makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.

Bastian Greshake, co-founder of openSNP, explained: “We started openSNP to crowdsource the discovery of genotype-phenotype associations. In less than a year, our users have uploaded over 200 genetic testing results and more than 3400 phenotypic annotations for over 100 different genetically influenced traits, which is a great success. Mendeley’s API enables our users to find the latest scientific literature – including thousands of Open Access articles – relevant to their own genetic testing results.”

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation and creator of ReaderMeter.org, said: “By sharing a large corpus of open-licensed data, Mendeley is laying the foundation for a whole new science of the making and spreading of scientific knowledge. This offers coders and researchers alike an unprecedented opportunity to map and measure the real-time impact of scientific research. Mendeley’s API is a mountain of data just waiting to be mined.” Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar, co-founders of Total-Impact.org, added: “Using Mendeley’s data, we can show how papers are making a difference long before they show up in the citation record, as well as which papers are making a difference to student readers, or readers in developing countries. Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without Mendeley’s commitment to releasing this data openly, under the CC-BY license.  A lot of us in the Open Science community are convinced that the we’re on the way to a system built on this kind of openness. In the future, researchers will interact with the literature via a web of interlocking, third-party applications for sorting, filtering, and conversing. By opening its valuable data to developers, Mendeley is helping us get there, today.”

Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and also a Mendeley Binary Battle judge, added: “This milestone shows how the future of science is being built, app by app, data source by data source. Open data is the biggest science story of the 21st century.”

Dr. Victor Henning, CEO & Co-Founder of Mendeley, said: “Our vision was always to make science more open. The Mendeley API liberates data that has been locked behind paywalls for decades – enabling app developers to reinvent academic workflows, research data discovery, even scientific publishing. Max Planck said: Science progresses funeral by funeral. I think we’ve found a better method.”

Mendeley API graphs and app screenshots:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendeley/sets/72157631195319638/

This week, leading academic institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia signed up to Mendeley’s new data dashboard, the Mendeley Institutional Edition. The dashboard analyses their research activity and impact on the global research community in real time – down from the 3-5 year time lag of the “Impact Factor”, the current gold standard for such evaluations. This allows academic institutions to react faster to their faculty’s research needs and provide them with quicker, more personalised support during the research process – thus accelerating the pace of scientific discovery for all of us.

The Impact Factor, a measure of the number of citations an academic journal receives, is a pivotal metric of science: Academics have to publish in high-Impact Factor journals to receive promotions, tenure, or grant funding, and universities allocate their million-dollar library budgets to those same high-Impact Factor journals. This is despite the Impact Factor’s many known flaws – the most limiting of which is that the citations it is based on take 3-5 years to accumulate.

This week’s release of Mendeley’s Institutional Edition, distributed by leading Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets, brings research impact measurement to real-time speed, while also providing more granular and social metrics of how academic research is consumed, discussed, and annotated. It allows research institutions to see detailed analytics of the journals their academics are reading, the journals they are publishing in, and how many readers those publications have. This data is built on Mendeley’s global research community of more than 1.8 million academics who are using the startup’s tools for document management, discovery, and collaboration.

The first customers of Mendeley’s data dashboard are premier international research institutions: Two prominent universities on the East Coast and in the Bay Area, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Nevada, Reno, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Research Council Japan.

Speaking of the announcement, Dr. Tod Colegrove, Head of DeLaMare Science & Engineering Library at University of Nevada, Reno, said: “Rather than spending vast amounts of staff resources attempting to quantify usage of existing library resources – remaining largely unaware of past and present use outside of the library’s current subscribed offerings – Mendeley offers a unique and immediate lens into the library’s researchers’ information behaviours. Purchase decisions can be informed directly by past and present actual use of potential library resources, rather than being left to the increasingly less relevant the-way-we’ve-always-done–it model of serials management.” His colleague Lisa Kurt added: “The collaborative nature of Mendeley is a game changer for our institution where departments and colleges are working to break through their silos and focus on the best parts of the work they do. Mendeley is solving a very real problem in a rather elegant way.”

At the University of Western Ontario, Head Librarian Joyce Garnett commented: “Western Libraries is proud to be an early adopter of Mendeley Institutional Edition, a significant addition to our digital toolbox. It will facilitate citation management for individual researchers, collaboration for research groups, and, through its analytics capacity, enable librarians to assess the relevance and use of our collections. Mendeley is unique, growing its database organically through the choices and preferences of researchers as they create and disseminate new knowledge.”

In a bid to develop alternatives to the Impact Factor, new research metrics startups such as altmetric.com and total-impact.org have already turned to Mendeley’s readership data, and several peer-reviewed studies have recently highlighted its positive correlation with the Impact Factor. Dr. Victor Henning, CEO and co-founder of Mendeley, said: “I’m excited that after receiving scientific validation from the research community, our data is now helping some of the world’s best universities work more efficiently and get to life-changing discoveries faster. My inner nerd is going: Wow, this is freaking amazing.”

Mendeley Institutional Edition screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendeley/sets/72157630651813190/

We’ve got another addition to the trophy case here at Mendeley. Fast Track has given Mendeley a “One to Recognise” award. Fast Track champions the UK’s top-performing private companies and entrepreneurs and The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s 100 private tech companies with the fastest growth over the past three years. Co-founder Paul Föckler was presented with the award on the 16th of November and it puts us in very good company. Of course, we couldn’t have done this without the support of the million plus researchers that make our service as valuable as it is, so we are very grateful for the support we have received and are committed to making the next three years even better.

GO Team Mendeley!

The Telegraph recently announced their list of Europe’s Top 100 startups and we’re so pleased to have made the list, in the Education category. We’ve won quite a few awards already, but we’re particularly pleased to be on this list, as it was compiled by some of the top venture capitalists and tech executives from Europe and Silicon Valley. We believe we can change how research is done, so it’s a great affirmation to hear that others also believe in the work we’re doing.

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Today we announce that the API is now open to anyone wishing to create fantastic tools with data that can change the world.

This past April we released a beta version of the Mendeley API and invited a few developers to start building applications on top of all of the rich data found here. (See NYTimes). Since then, we’ve been bulking up our data center, extending the API methods, and listening to the great feedback from the early developers.

We have also been working on a way to make working with such data more enticing, i.e. make it sexy enough for developers who have never ventured into building applications with science data.

With that in mind, the new developer portal was born out of lots of blood, sweat, and tears. Actually, we all loved working on this, because science has never been so cool and arguably never this accessible to the masses. It would have been impossible without the incredible work of Rosario García de Zúñiga, Steve Dennis and many others.

That said, happy coding and check out the Mendeley Developers Portal. And if you want your app showcased, let us know!

Jason Hoyt, PhD
Chief Scientist and VP of R&D
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We are honoured to announce that our Keynote Speakers for Science Online London 2010 are Lord Martin Rees, Evan Harris and Aleks Krotoski.

Widely acknowledged as one of the world’s preeminent cosmologists, Lord Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Trinity College, Cambridge – in addition to being a prolific author and speaker. He has received countless awards for his varied contributions to his field, and was this year elected to deliver the Reith Lectures for the BBC. Billed by TED as ‘one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity within the cosmos’, Lord Rees has also served on many bodies here in the UK and abroad, dealing with education and international collaboration in science.

Evan Harris was a doctor before entering politics, eventually becoming the Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Minister in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and Shadow Minister for Science until May this year. He remains a strong voice for science within Parliament.

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. For her PhD in Social Psychology, she examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She writes regularly for the Guardian and the Observer, and hosts a technology podcast called Tech Weekly. Just this February, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC Two – a documentary about the social history of the Web.

This will again be an amazing conference, aimed at changing the face of science. We are still a month away from the conference and have few tickets left, so you need to move fast if you want to join us.

You can follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf (comment with hashtag #solo10).