Some may have already heard the news that 2collab, a product of Elsevier, is no longer accepting new users and will be shutting down in due time (updated). 2collab and Scopus Product Manager, Michael Habib, announced this on January 16th at the Science Online conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Seeking to provide a reading list alternative for their 2collab users, it was also announced at Science Online that Mendeley was chosen to enable the opt-in transfer of any 2collab public library folders.

How it works:

1) If you are a 2collab user and do not have a Mendeley account you will first need to sign up here for free.
2) Once registered or for those already registered on Mendeley, go to the ‘Accounts’ link located at the top of the Dashboard page after signing into Mendeley.com.
3) At the bottom of the accounts page you will see a form for entering your 2collab username details.
4) Your public folders will be imported and the next time you open or sync the Mendeley desktop software those folders will be visible. They will also be available on the Web at Mendeley.com and can be viewed by proceeding to the ‘Library’ page.
5) Within the Mendeley desktop, you will then have the option to turn those folders into ‘public collections’ so that others can continue to stay up to date with what you are reading via RSS and other means. For example, here is a feed on Norovirus.

Please contact 2collab if you need any help specific to 2collab.

We wish the 2collab team the best and know that they are already working on some great stuff at Scopus and elsewhere.

Jason Hoyt, PhD
Research Director | Mendeley

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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!

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just closed a $2 million funding round, led by Stefan Glänzer (former chairman of Last.fm, now in the same role at Mendeley), Alex Zubillaga (former Executive VP of Digital Strategy and Business Development at Warner Music Group) and ASI (the fund of Skype’s former founding engineers)!

Further investors are former Last.fm COO Spencer Hyman and academics from leading US and UK universities. The news also made its way onto TechCrunch – click the image below to read the article:

Of course, this means that our work is only starting!

We have a new release scheduled for next week, and we won’t rest before we’ve turned Mendeley into hands down the best software and website for managing, sharing and discovering research papers. Just so you know!

Great news, everyone: Today we’d like to announce a collaboration between CiteULike and Mendeley!

How will this collaboration look, you ask? Let’s see where we’re starting from:

CiteULike is a browser-based tool which lets you bookmark research papers online and import the corresponding metadata into your public CiteULike account. Mendeley, on the other hand, develops desktop software which creates your personal library database by automatically extracting metadata and cited references from the research papers on your hard drive. You can then manage and full-text search your papers, back them up online, share them with colleagues, and create bibliographies.

What we will do is make our systems interoperable: If you have an account both on CiteULike and on Mendeley, you will be able to synchronize data between your two accounts. Your CiteULike account will show up as a “Document Group” in our Mendeley Desktop software, thus making your CiteULike metadata available to you in a desktop interface – from where you can manage them offline or insert citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word, for example. Likewise, by dragging & dropping metadata from your Mendeley Library into the CiteULike “Document Group”, the metadata will be uploaded to your web-based CiteULike account.

CiteULike and us had started to talk about such an integration late last year, and now we’ve begun the necessary back-end work, too. Unfortunately we can’t give you a due date yet, but we’ll keep you posted as things progress! Did I say that we’re very excited about this? ‘Cause we are!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2008

Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The founders’ vision to create a “Last.fm for research” excited Skype’s former founding engineers, who became investors, and former Last.fm executive chairman Stefan Glänzer, who is now executive chairman of the company.

London, UK – When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”

After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype, who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita through their investment fund ASI. Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”

About Mendeley: Mendeley develops software for managing and sharing research papers as well as a website for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. The company was founded in 2007 by Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt and is based in London, UK.

Screenshot 1: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers.

Screenshot 2: Mendeley Web lets researchers access their papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded scholars and academics.

For further information contact Victor Henning (victor.henning@mendeley.com), Tel: +44-207-2531595, or visit www.mendeley.com.
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