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.

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.

Photo courtesy of Kenn W. Kiser

A little while back we sent out a survey to a few of our users asking for their stories about how Mendeley had helped them in their research, and we got quite a few responses from our community. What we also found out is that now that we’ve been around for a while – actually, we launched our first beta on the 2nd April 2008, which makes Mendeley 5 years old – there are researchers out there who have used Mendeley all the way through the process of researching their PhD thesis, and many continue to use it now they’ve graduated. We’ve picked our top 10 respondents, who have all been with us for over 3 years, to share some of their favourite things about Mendeley. We’d love to see if you agree, or if you have any stories of your own you’d like to share… Usually we don’t like to toot our own horn, but hopefully since it’s our birthday you’ll forgive us!

1. “Mendeley has enabled my different collaborations to share papers and ideas, and it has enabled me to use Latex in a more efficient way. Keeping tabs on the references and results of experimental data in organic photovoltaics has been made simpler through the use of Shared Libraries and the annotations one can make in the papers.” Roberto Olivares-Amaya, Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Theoretical Chemistry from Princeton University, NJ.
2. “I use Mendeley collaboratively: We hold reading groups where everyone annotates the pdf with questions / comments on the paper coming up. During the meeting, we put Mendeley on the big screen and go through the papers / presentations bit by bit. The literature survey I had to do for one of my checkpoints was also greatly helped by Mendeley. I had an entire framework of tags that would allow me to quickly find the papers for a particular technique, the papers for a particular chapter, or even the papers that followed a similar methodology. Every paper was annotated with the key points that I had to summarize, and it made writing the survey far easier in the end. It is turning out to be pretty much the same story with my dissertation, which I’m just getting underway now.” Christian Muise, Computer and Information Science PhD Student from the University of Toronto, specializing in Artificial Intelligence.
3. “My PhD was interdisciplinary – half computational systems biology, half experimental parasitology – so I had twice the background reading to do. Mendeley helped me organise that reading and see links across the subjects.” Thomas Forth, recently completed his PhD in Systems Biology of the Malaria parasite at Leeds University.
4. “Scientists have been waiting a long time for this.  Mendeley is great, I can sync my papers across all of the different computers in our lab. When we are writing papers, everyone can have the same list of references and can actually see the same pdf files that I’m using.” Daniel Hickstein, a Physics Graduate Student specialising in Ultrafast laser spectroscopy at the university of Colorado.
5. “Mendeley has been useful throughout my whole PhD experience. Being able to highlight, put notes for when I read it again, and send that edited version to a colleague has been an excellent collaborative tool.” Alejandro Montenegro-Montero, a Biologist specializing in Molecular Science from P. Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago.
6. “Mendeley made it much easier to share articles with other members of my project over the years. Every time a new student joined our group, I could simply share the collection with them and point out which articles are the most important to read simply by starring them.” Joshua Middaugh, a Graduate Engineering Student at MIT specializing in Combustion and Energy.
7. “With Mendeley I can store, organize the documents and share them with others.  And this was a free software from the beginning. I find it useful that I can read and tag my documents and make a reference list for my publications.  I can find relevant articles fast using my tags. Mendeley is always useful when I need to find specific articles quickly or articles on specific topic for an example when discussing a subject with someone.” Joose Kreutzer, Engineering Researcher specializing in Microfabrication and microfluidics at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland.
8. “Mendeley works on Linux! Allows you to keep your notes attached to your pdf files and search through everything easily. There are other citing applications for Linux but they are antiquated and made the process of looking after my references more work than I had time for. Mendeley made organising my thesis references the enjoyable part.” Andrew Dunk, a Researcher in Computer and Information Science specializing in Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces from The University of Reading.
9. “Probably the most valuable thing Mendeley has offered me is the way to easily include original sources rather than just subsidiary results—i.e., it’s trivially easy to keep track of that 1939 Vollmer book rather than citing something that references it.  So I feel like that process makes it easier for the end user of my research to see the real provenance of ideas rather than the temptation to cite recent sources.” Neal Davis, Nuclear Engineering graduate student from the University of Illinois.
10. “The problem I have is that I read a lot of papers but when I need to recall them I cannot always remember the title or even the author. There are either phrases or other things that stick in my mind. With Mendeley I can always search these terms and retrieve the document.” Nikolaos Vasiloglou, Electrical and Electronic Engineering data scientist specializing in Machine Learning from Georgia Tech.

Our Mendeley Advisors have been doing great work all around the world. We’d like to recognize them with this post and to let you know that if you have questions about Mendeley, you can reach out to your local advisor for help.

USA:Chris Erdmann

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) Head Librarian and Mendeley Advisor, Chris Erdmann was kind enough to lend out the super-cool Collaborative Space (complete with Wii) @ the Wolbach Library for a Boston Advisor & Librarian Meet-Up and separately organized a demo for the Institutional Edition with all of Harvard’s key librarians.

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UPDATE: The RFIs have now been posted and there’s a petition opposing the RWA on whitehouse.gov.

The US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently issued a Request for Information on their existing policy requiring some federally-funded work to be submitted to Pubmed Central, where it’s freely accessible to the public. We were pleased to have the opportunity to respond and a summary of our response is below. Before getting into that, however, I’d like to take a little detour and talk a little about our mission and how that relates to the scholarly endeavor. Our mission at Mendeley is to help researchers organize research, collaborate easily with colleagues, and discover new research. (more…)

As we cross over into the latter half of the academic semester, I can already tell it’s going to be a great semester for us. We’ve crossed over a million users and have seen millions of documents added in the past few months. This isn’t to toot our own horn, though, because we couldn’t have done it without the support of the wonderful Mendeley community. So I’d like to take a few sentences to thank everyone who has made this our best semester yet.
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We want to invite YOU to be part of Mendeley by becoming a Mendeley University Advisor!

If you are a power user and are enthusiastic about Mendeley and what we want to achieve and you’d like to spread the word about us at your university – while receiving some great benefits along the way – now’s your chance!

Hundreds of your friends and colleagues around the world have joined as Mendeley Advisors. They serve as official Mendeley representatives at their institutions and help us keep in touch with Mendeley’s growing userbase. See who’s in your area on our Advisor Map or check out upcoming events on the events page. (more…)

Calling all librarian and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. We’ll discuss topics such as:

• What Mendeley is (and what it’s not)
• Who’s using Mendeley
• How Mendeley works with your existing information systems
• Mendeley and intellectual property
• Mendeley’s role in the future of libraries

William Gunn, Head of Academic Outreach will be conducting this session. There will be plenty of time for questions after and during the session.

Date: Friday, May 20th 2011 Time: 10:00 am EDT Presenter: William Gunn

UPDATE: You can attend via ipad with the updated GoToMeeting software, but you’ll need to update on the day of the webinar, so join a bit early.