Since we are getting closer to releasing version 1.0, we were discussing how to get even more detailed feedback from our users than we currently get through our support system.
Being able to chat with you guys face-to-face would obviously be best so we said: lets try it and do an ‘Open Office Feedback Session’. Meaning that everyone who is interested can drop in to our offices in Clerkenwell and talk to different members of the team and tell us face-to-face what you like to see improved or added to Mendeley. You can also bring your notebooks and show us directly what’s not working for you or which feature you would like to do differently.
Your feedback is very valuable to us so as a thank you we would serve drinks and snacks at our office which we could even have on our roof terrace if the weather will allow it, probably not – lets face it .
If you’re interested, please drop us an email at community@mendeley.com. We’re looking forward to meeting you!
We’ll be discussing the future of academic publishing, science on the Web, or anything else that comes up.
Those in the U.S. might recognize Leo from his nationally syndicated radio show “The Tech Guy.” We will broadcast from Leo’s live studio just outside San Francisco.
Participate: OK Mendelians, now is your chance to ask all of the important questions you have been saving up. What does Victor eat for lunch? Does the Mendeley dev team room smell? What exactly does the Mendeley logo represent?
Or, you can ask a few more serious questions.
Join the chat room to ask questions or just watch what others are commenting on. The chat room can be found on the same page as the broadcast. Please join so that I don’t just get questions from my mom, who I know will be watching. Sorry, Mom.
It just occurred to me that, because I went on vacation immediately afterward, we didn’t yet post a photo of our TechCrunch Europas Award! Two weeks ago, we won the prize for “Best Social Innovation (Which Benefits Society)”. Wonderful title, isn’t it?
A big thank you to everyone who voted for us, to the Europas jury, to event organizer Mike Butcher and Moonfruit (for sponsoring the prize), and of course our team who made this possible!
We are happy to announce two new members of the Mendeley family. While Carles Pina adds some Spanish flavour to Mendeley Desktop, Nicholas Jones increments the Southampton University headcount to three by bringing some award-winning expertise to the Mendeley Web table. In their own words:
Carles Pina is a software engineer at Mendeley. He studied computer engineering at La Salle – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona and thought working for Mendeley is a perfect reason to relocate to rainy London. Well, after growing up near Barcelona most cities feel ‘rainy’ he thinks.
In his spare time, he enjoys programming in C, Python or C++ maintaining projects like qdacco or contributing to other free software projects. He is also fascinated by attending computer meetings in general and loves traveling.
Nicholas Jones is a software engineer for Mendeley Web. He studied Computer Science at the University of Southampton, graduating with a BSc in 2009. Whilst at the University of Southampton he won the Sir William Siemens Prize for “excellence and innovation on an individual 3rd year project” and the Netcraft Prize for acedemic acheivements in his 2nd year.
When not coding away at PHP and JavaScript, Nicholas enjoys trawling through social news sites such as Reddit, looking for interesting and invigorating items to read. Nicholas also has a keen interest in music and when not listening to it, may be found strumming away at his guitar.
Here’s my recent talk at the Next ’09, where we were part of the start-up session (the Mendeley presentation starts at the 10:40 mark). Watching myself on video makes me cringe, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good. At least one guy thought it was, fortunately. Enjoy!
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.
[Victor:] Completing our trinity of Community LiaisonGoodness, may I introduce Brandon King! He is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at Brown University, doing fascinating research on brain-computer interfaces (so don’t mess with him, or his army of cyborgs will come and get you. No, I just made that up. He’s as nice and funny as they come). We’re excited to have him on our team! Here’s his introduction in his own words:
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I graduated college 2001, the year that journals were just beginning to become available online. So, for the vast majority of my undergraduate existence, I was forced to do the unthinkable: go to libraries and pull articles from the stacks. “I don’t get it. I’m looking for small bits of constantly updated text, so for my uses, the whole library could be replaced by a web page and a search box.” Of course, this was back when saying you read something on the internet was akin to citing facts from a fictional work.
After spending five years in ‘industry’, I decided to return to academia to continue research on brain-computer interfaces. When I discovered that I could download almost any paper on any topic I could imagine, I was like a kid in a candy store. I could hear my Windows machine cry when the indexer hit my “Papers” folder. As I honed in on my eventual project/thesis topic, I began to amass a big collection of PDFs. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just sit down for a whole day at some point and organize it all!”
That was when my papers were numbering around 200. After discovering RSS feeds and launching a blog, that number quickly ballooned up into the thousands. As I type this, there are ~3,700 papers in my library. Yes, it is impossible for me to have read them all, but having read at least the abstracts from each, the interplay of all these ideas and the trends in topics over time have played a major role in shaping my understanding of my field of interest.
Did I mention that none of these PDFs have file names? Well, they didn’t, unless you consider sdarticle(122).pdf to be a useful identifier.
As I started working on my project proposal, I knew I had to find some way to keep this mountain of information in order. It should be easy enough to spend a couple hours tediously searching for each paper in one of those ‘reference manager’ programs, right? Or someone must have come up with a really snazzy web app to take care of references, right? Wrong and wrong. At least that’s what I thought until a member of the Mendeley team brought their program to my attention.
Maybe I dismissed it at first because of the beta moniker or the funny name, but as soon as I installed Mendeley and started to play with it, I was hooked. The hours, nay, days, it saved me made it instantly one of my ‘must have’ programs.
I saw huge potential in Mendeley, and started submitting suggestions and bug reports (it was in version 0.5 at the time) and when Victor came to the States to talk with university librarians, we arranged to meet. I walked away thinking Mendeley could easily be a game changer in the same way online journal access changed research.
We came up with the idea of adding the position I am now starting at because realizing the potential of this awesome tool is only possible by engaging the people that are going to use it. Each lab, each researcher, and each student has their own system of compensating for the near Paleolithic Era reference management tools they have access to. To make Mendeley the most useful program out there, we have to get your feedback on how we can better adapt Mendeley to the way YOU work while at the same time gently nudging people away from the status quo in which reference managing is tedious but necessary. I want to make Mendeley as much a source for creating ideas and new connections between ideas as it is for simply managing references. I think one of the unspoken lessons of research is that you have to stop looking at papers as files or a limited set of ideas, and understand instead how the work fits into the topic of interest as a whole. My hope is that Mendeley will allow researchers to bridge old ideas, inspire new ones, and provide a platform for sharing the information that led them to a novel insight. You know. Small goals, like change everything.
Hurray! William Gunn has joined us as Community Liaison! Ricardo Vidal became our first Community Liaison two weeks ago, so with William we have now doubled the brains and talent behind our outreach efforts. William has just completed his Ph.D. on adult stem cells and bone biology at Tulane University. On his blog Synthesis, he has also been writing about open science and social research software. Here’s the story (re-posted from Synthesis) on how he came to join us, in his own words:
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Reference managers and I have a long history. All the way back in 2004, when I was writing my first paper, my workflow went something like this:
“I need to cite Drs. A, B, and C here. Now, where did I put that paper from Dr. A?” I’d search through various folders of PDFs, organized according to a series of evolving categorization schemes and rifle through ambiguously labeled folders in my desk drawers, pulling out things I knew I’d need handy later. If I found the exact paper I was looking for, I’d then open Reference Manager (v6, I think) and enter the citation details, each in their respective fields. Finding the article, I’d select it and add it to the group of papers I was accumulating.
If it didn’t find it, I’d then go to Pubmed and search for the paper, again entering each citation detail in its field, and then do the required clicking to get the .ris file, download that, then import that into Reference Manager. Then I’d move the reference from the “imported files” library to my library, clicking away the 4 or 5 confirmation dialogs that occurred during this process. On to the next one, which I wouldn’t be able to find a copy of, and would have to search Pubmed for, whereupon I’d find more recent papers from that author, if I was searching by author, or other relevant papers from other authors, if I was searching by subject. Not wanting to cite outdated info, I’d click through from Pubmed to my school’s online catalog, re-enter the search details to find the article in my library’s system, browse through the system until I found a link to the paper online, download the PDF and .ris file (if available), or actually get off my ass and go to the library to make a copy of the paper.
As I was reading the new paper from the Dr. B, I’d find some interesting new assertion, follow that trail for a bit to see how good the evidence was, get distracted by a new idea relevant to an experiment I wanted to do, and emerge a couple hours later with an experiment partially planned and wanting to re-structure the outline for my introduction to incorporate the new perspective I had achieved. Of course, I’d want to check that I wouldn’t be raising the ire of a likely reviewer of the paper by not citing the person who first came up with the idea, so I’d have some background reading to do on a couple of likely reviewers. The whole process, from the endless clicking away of confirmation prompts to the fairly specific Pubmed searches which nonetheless pulled up thousands of results, many of which I wasn’t yet aware, made for extraordinarily slow going. It was XKCD’s wikipedia problem writ large. (more…)
Yesterday we posted a photo of the Mendeley Team on our roof terrace, trying to jump simultaneously to celebrate our Plugg.eu win:
Always vigilant, our very own Dr. Ridout said he “noticed something creepy” about the photo. Thanks to his keen perception and a few very subtle, barely noticeable image enhancements, he was able to uncover the harrowing truth! Here is the unsettling evidence, not suitable for minors:
We’re still in a state of disbelief that we won the start-up pitching competition at Plugg.eu! We honestly thought we’d go to Brussels and not many people would care about this peculiar research software start-up, with so many other more mainstream-focused start-ups (movies, telecommunication, advertising…) in the running. But I’m getting ahead of myself – here’s the full story:
Even before the conference started, Jan and I had managed to get ourselves confused. In true (and unwise) start-up fashion, we had planned on finishing our presentation the night before the pitch, i.e. the Wednesday on which we would be leaving to Brussels. The weekend before, I had been visiting my girlfriend in Hamburg. On Monday morning, when I was still in Hamburg, Jan called me on my mobile:
Jan: Uh, you know, I just found out we have to hand in our Plugg presentations at noon today.
Victor: At noon… today?
Jan: Today.
Victor: That’s in about 3 hours! That’s not good!
Jan: Right.
Victor: And we have this other conference call now…
Jan: … so we’ll have to do the presentation after that.
Victor: Riiiiight…
So we had to figure out a way to finish both the two-minute pitch and the ten-minute presentation (which would only be needed if we were elected as one of the three finalists) within two hours. What we decided to do was: Take the presentation we usually give to universities and libraries, take some slides from the pitch we used to give to VCs when we were looking for funding, mix them up well, hope it’s coherent.
On Wednesday afternoon, we boarded the EuroStar to Brussels. Later that day, all the start-up rally participants were invited to a nice dinner (I forgot which hotel it was). We returned to our own hotel in the centre of Brussels shortly before midnight and thought it would be a good time for me to start practicing the two-minute pitch. Despite (or because of) the couple glasses of wine I had, it went quite well on the second or third try, so we called it a day.
After a little more than five hours sleep, in which Jan and I had to fight over the same blanket, we got up again and made our way to the Plugg conference. There were some pastries for breakfast, which I couldn’t eat due to my egg allergy, so coffee was all I got. Lack of preparation, lack of sleep, lack of breakfast and an overdose of caffeine then summed up to a pretty jittery feeling before I was finally called on stage for the pitch.
Actually, it was Jan who was called on stage due to a mix-up, so I opened our pitch with the odd choice of “I’m actually not Jan, but that’s not important.” I thought it didn’t get better from there: The jittery feeling had developed into a first-rate nervousness, the slide clicker didn’t work properly and skipped slides, and the timer which told me how many seconds I had left was only shown intermittently, blacking out the screen on which I could view my slides. Here’s me stumbling through it (at least that’s what it felt like to me):
So after I returned to my seat, I said to Jan: “I completely borked that one, didn’t I?”, to which he responded “Weeell… maybe not completely.” We both thought that that had been it – at least we wouldn’t have to worry about the ten-minute pitch in the afternoon, which we hadn’t practiced at all.
Imagine our surprise when the audience reaction on Twitter wasn’t that bad, and some people even congratulated us on a good pitch during the lunch break! I concluded that they had probably seen someone else’s pitch. However, it got even weirder when the jury announced the three finalists: Jinni, Myngle, and us! After Jan and I had calmed down again, my first thought was: “Ok, I should better think about what to say.”
So I was still a little nervous when I was called Jan was called to the stage for the final presentation again. Here’s the result:
I felt the talk, again, was ok, but far from great – but the Q&A at the end went reasonably well. Yet to me, Marina’s/Myngle’s talk seemed much smoother, and after they had won the Audience Award (congrats to Myngle!), I was sure that they’d win the jury vote as well.
As the overall winner was being announced, I can’t even express how STUNNED Jan and I were when the Mendeley logo was projected onto the screen! WOOO-HOOO! The next few minutes are a blur of hugging, jumping up and down, and celebrating. Not only had we won the vote of the jury, composed of acclaimed VCs and academics, but also €2,000 credit at Amazon Web Services and a brand-new X2250 server from Sun!
And here’s a funny aside: Just three hours earlier, sitting next to me in the audience, Jan had ordered a new server from Dell because we were badly in need of a new one. Guess who we had to call right after our win to cancel the order?
What followed was a pretty fabulous evening in Brussels! Jan and I were too exhausted to party – instead, we just went to a nice little restaurant in Ixelles (close to where I studied back in 2002) and had a quiet dinner in excellent spirits. Merci Bruxelles! Photos from our trip can be found on our Flickr account.
P.S. Thank you to everyone who made this such a memorable event for us: First of all, the entire Mendeley Team without which none of this would be possible; the jury and the audience, the Plugg conference organizers and sponsors, and all the great people we met and talked to – you know who you are…
P.P.S. Here are some photos of the Mendeley Team celebrating the win on our roofterrace in the sunshine:
Fig. 1: Nerds trying to jump at the same time, failing badly
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ving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.
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