Last Friday, March 1^st, Mendeley co-founder Jan Reichelt went to the London Web Summit to discuss what the future holds in store for Online Education. The panel, which explored the issues behind the explosion of EdTech, also included Chip Paucek (CEO of online degrees start-up 2U), Andrew Ng (Co-Founder of Coursera, a platform for universities to provide free online courses) and Memrise Co-Founder Ed Cooke

Jan talked about how Mendeley’s 2 million users contribute an enormous amount of scientific data to the platform, which then allows developers to build interesting and useful applications on its open API.

There is no doubt that web adoption is increasing, specially within education, accelerated even more by the introduction of new and improved web technologies. Andrew from Coursera, who is a professor at Stanford, told of how through his online course he now routinely reached 100,000 students where before he would be teaching 400.

The panelists agreed that availability, access to, and accreditation of high quality online learning will only increase in future; Online lectures will continue to permeate traditional learning and will free up more and more time for professors to do more interactive and one-to-one learning in class.

Enabling more effective collaboration and communication online was a key theme of the panel, and Jan explained Mendeley’s vision of building a global platform for research collaboration, and helping researcher’s workflow to speed up science.

The panel thought it was important not to focus on platforms for their own sake, but to also make sure they solve real problems and address real needs of institutions as well as individuals; schools embracing the web makes a huge difference. Businesses like 2U and Coursera exist because of their ability to partner with such institutions, and Mendeley’s Institutional Edition has been adopted by some of the world’s leading universities since its launch last year.

You can watch a video of the panel here

There’s been some great news for Mendeley this week. For the second time in our 4-year history, we’ve won a major award at The Europas, considered the Oscars of the European Tech scene.

Mendeley’s founders Jan, Paul, and Victor, who started Mendeley in 2009 in London, were voted the “Best Startup Founders” by The Europas Judges. They were up against high-profile competition from the founders of DataHug, Hailo, Huddle, Mind Candy, Songkick, SoundCloud, TransferWise, Wonga, and Zoopla. Mendeley had already scooped up the “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” award at The Europas in 2009.

“It’s both wonderful and humbling to have won the Best Startup Founders award, especially when nominated alongside some of the most inspiring tech entrepreneurs in Europe. To me, this award is really a recognition of the passionate, creative, and dedicated team we have assembled, and the work we have done together. Thanks also go to our 1,700 Mendeley Advisors and fantastic community of over 2 million users worldwide”, said Victor, our Co-founder and CEO.

We will continue to work on making science more open and collaborative on a global scale, beginning with the recent push towards moving our infrastructure to our Open API. Thank you for your support!

I’m here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for Open Science Summit. This is my third year at the conference and it’s so great to see so many familiar faces. I’ll be talking about the developments in open access over the past few years and updating this page as the day progresses.

9:00 – The day starts off with Tyler Neylon recounting the story of the Cost of Knowledge petition. He’s drawing from a historical view to project into the future of open access. (more…)

William Gunn, Head of Academic Outreach for Mendeley, and Elizabeth Iorns, cofounder and CEO of Science Exchange, are giving a series of career development seminars at east coast universities over the next few weeks. See below for the dates and locations and check your local event listings for more information.

Please stop by, I’d love to meet you!

Seminar Tour:

I recently had an opportunity to attend the Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego. The Experimental Biology comprises 7 scientific societies who come together to have one (HUGE!) meeting once a year. There was tons of interesting science reported, from the science of Yogic breathing to the effects of fructose on the body, but most relevant to the Mendeley community as a whole was the panel discussion on communicating your science. The panel included a Nobel Laureate, Paul Berg, Joe Palca from NPR’s Science Friday, Megan Palmer from SynBERC, and Cara Santa Maria from the Huffington Post. This was a diverse panel and got quite exciting towards the end. (more…)

Calling all librarians 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. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: (more…)

The London Web Summit is doing something a little different this year. Instead of having a panel of presumed experts judge sites and hand out awards, they’re opening up the process to everyone. Here’s your chance to tell the world that you value companies that are doing something truly useful for the world, as opposed to just another photo sharing or coupon pushing app. We’re now in the top 10 by votes, but we need a little more help. The research community may be small, but its voice is loud. Get yours heard.

If you’re like most people I know, you’d like to keep up with technology, but you just don’t have the time to sit down and spend a few hours learning how to use a new application. We understand. Give us an hour on the 13th or 14th and we’ll get you up and running, so you can enjoy the productivity enhancement with minimal time investment.

There will be two sessions, both at 2 PM EST on December 13 & 14. The first session will focus more on topics relevant to librarians, while the second one is designed for researchers in academic institutions. Both sessions will be introductory and suitable for folks with no prior experience, but will also give updates on getting the most out of newly released features. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: (more…)

We, along with PLoS, have been overwhelmed by the huge response that academics and the developer community have given to open up science. When we announced this contest to develop science applications on top of the Mendeley and PLoS platforms last March, we were not totally sure that anyone would even be interested. Boy, were we wrong!

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and one of five all-star judges, said this about the Binary Battle –

“I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It’s time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?”

Mendeley launched the API platform in April of 2010 with the hope that it would 1) spur innovation in the science ecosystem and 2) send a signal to others that opening up data benefits everyone. To date, more than 1000 developers have applied for API keys to build on top of that data. With the Binary Battle announcement, we hoped to carry open science further and by all accounts we did.

Today we announce the winners of the 2011 Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. We narrowed the Binary Battle entries down to the Top 10+1, and then handed the voting over to our list of expert judges (Werner Vogels, Juan Enriquez, Tim O’Reilly, James Powell, and John Wilbanks. We also opened the vote up to the public to count as 1/6 and combined with the judges. It was great to see that both the public voting and the judges voting correlated very well. It was so close for many of the apps, but one stood out to both the judges and the public…. (more…)

Calling all librarians 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. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as: (more…)