This time around, we have a friendly chat with our VP Finance & Operations David Lee, who’s been with us here at Mendeley for just under a year, before which he worked for the likes of EMI and Betfair.

What made you apply for a job at Mendeley?
Mendeley ticked all the criteria I was looking for in my next challenge: I wanted to help build a company with an innovative/disruptive product with huge potential. Work with real entrepreneurs and have a role with lots of responsibility and impact.

When you started working here, were things like you expected?
I knew there would be a cultural change going from a corporate to a start-up, but I was pleasantly surprised. Mendeley has a fun environment and a genuine team culture, it really feels like we are all in the same boat working together to make something great.

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
I like to think that I have brought a certain level of organisation and focus to the company. Not too much, but just enough.

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
The ability to get stuff done quickly and have a very real and immediate impact is highly rewarding and refreshing (compared with a larger corp organisation).

Do you have any pets? If not, what would be your ideal one?
My ideal pet would be a Dashchund that shits money.

Who would be invited to your perfect dinner party? (you may include fictional characters and dead people)
I was lucky enough recently to be invited to a dinner party with this years BAFTA winners/nominees. It would be hard to top that.

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
The ability to fly

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
Steve Jobs biography – it’s taken me months to get through. I am always reading about entrepreneurs, innovation, start-ups and business strategy.

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
Suffering

What was the first record you ever bought?
Starship – Nothings going to stop us now.

What music is on your iPod at the moment?
I am mostly on Spotify now. I love using their app platform for music discovery.

Favourite food/drink?
I do love a tasty burger

Favourite film?
Impossible question. But Star Wars would feature somewhere close to the top.

Favourite place in the world?
Tokyo with my wife

Three things you would put in Room 101
Jan, Victor and Paul! ha ha ha ha! Only kidding, those guys rock.

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give
unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it
be and why
Time travel.

Academics in physics, economics, or math often think that life scientists (like myself) are weird because life science doesn’t have a preprint server. Life science is a fast-paced discipline, but there’s no place where the latest research can be found, discussed, and where the primacy of results can be established. There’s a lot of value in life science research (the reproducible subset, that is) but instead of staking your claim to a finding shortly after you get the data, many researchers feel like they have to write a polished paper, submit it to a prestigious journal, and wait nerve-wracking months to years for the process of review, rejection, resubmission to finally make their results available to a subset of others in their field.As submission-to-publication times grow, fears of someone else getting there first grow and there are often accusations of “anonymous” reviewers asking for more experiments, just to delay the publication of a paper from a competing lab. What can be done about this? Read more »

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.

Everyone is using Twitter these days. It’s a great way to communicate and keep up to date with your social network of friends and interests. Therefore, we thought you’d be interested in being able to hook up your Mendeley and Twitter account so that folks can keep up with your research interests and output.

Just follow these simple steps and you should have your Mendeley account connected to your Twitter account in no time.

1. Log into Mendeley Web (http://www.mendeley.com)
2. Go to the account details section.



3. Then select the Sharing/Importing tab.



4. Click on the “Connect” button. You will be sent to Twitter’s website so that you can authorize the connection. (Don’t worry, we do not have access to your Twitter details, that’s why you are sent to their website!)



5. You’ll be sent back to Mendeley after approving the connection on Twitter’s site.
6. You can now select which activities you perform in Mendeley will be tweeted in your Twitter account. Simply check or uncheck the boxes you want and click “Update settings”.

Here’s an example of a tweet of someone adding a new publication to their “My Publications” folder:

I just added my own publication: ‘Effects of gene flow on phenotype matching between two varieties of Joshua tree…’ mnd.ly/11Egj98

— Jeremy Yoder (@JBYoder) March 25, 2013

So there you go, you can now have Mendeley automatically tweet selected bits of your Mendeley activity. We look forward to reading your tweets!

Here are the previous entries in this twelve part How-to series:

• How to merge author names
• How to drag and drop PDF links into Mendeley for direct download
• Generate BibTeX files for your collections for use in LaTeX
• How to check for duplicate entries and merging
• How to copy & paste formatted citations anywhere (LaTeX too!)
• How to add supplementary data to references
• How to keep references and documents unpublished (out of catalog)
• How to export your annotations (alone or with your PDF)
• How to merge contiguous citations with word plugin.
• How to search your notes (and other fields)

This week we ask some questions of our bubbly Office Manager Carole, who is responsible for keeping things looking lovely and working smoothly here at Mendeley HQ. 

When you started working here, were things like you expected?
They were exactly like I imagined, really laid back and really interesting
people all passionate about the company

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
I am still working on making the office a fun place to work in and hopefully the
changes will be felt soon

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
Everyone is friendly and chatty (and breakfast obviously)

Do you have any pets?
I have a cat back in Madeira called Fluffy, he is all white and very fluffy. He is massive at over 7Kg and thinks he is a dog. He has one yellow eye and one blue eye. He is the best cat ever and needs attention all the time. If you don’t pay him any attention, he will come, sit on your laps and you cannot move.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
I have to say Facebook as I am following my friends from all around the world.

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
Air hostess. I love flying.

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
I would like to be a great singer

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
Sir Alan Sugar because I was curious to get to know the man more and have a better understanding of his business mind.

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
Now I am going to sound like a beauty pageant contestant and say world peace.

What was the first record you ever bought?
It was actually a present but my friend back in France got me Bros: ‘When will I be famous’, loved it.

What music is on your iPod at the moment?
On my MP3 player, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English music, oh and Turkish.

Favourite video hobby?
I love dancing.

Your greatest vice?
Smoking I guess

Favourite place in the world?
It would have to be Australia, I absolutely adored the East coast.

Three things you would put in Room 101
Spiders, thunder and onions

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give
unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it
be and why?

Medical research to beat diseases like cancer and Climate change to make sure we have a planet if we get to live longer

This week in our series of blogs about Team Mendeley we find out a bit more about our Lead Interaction Designer/iOS Product Manager Steve Dennis. When Mendeley was looking to expand its design team 3 years ago, our founders Victor Henning and Paul Föckler  approached Steve, who had moved to the UK from New Zealand just a month before… “they found my personal site through a science-hack-day I’d registered for. I started less than a week after first meeting Victor and Paul” he recalls.

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
Yes, for the better.  Everything is a lot more structured than it was 3 years ago, which allows for better planning, and ultimately better products for our users which is what matters.  Also free breakfast on Mondays is a pretty great addition!

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
Interacting with our users every day is what keeps me going.  Our users are friendly and very passionate about the product.

Do you have any pets? If not, what would be your ideal one?
If I had the option, it would be a baby monkey.  Riding backwards on a pig optional, but preferred.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
Is it ok to say Mendeley.com? Cause it actually pays for all my food…  Otherwise Twitter.

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
A rubbish collector.  Then a stunt-man.  Then a computer tech.  So I became a Designer.

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
Backend programming.  It would be amazing to be able to develop small product ideas in my spare time.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
Re-reading Indy Young’s ‘Mental Models’, because it’s always good to keep this stuff fresh.

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
I’d make burgers healthy enough to be eaten every day, and plentiful enough for that to be sustainable.

What was the first record you ever bought?
Garbage’s first album.

What music is on your iPod at the moment?
First ten bands via shuffle: Machine Head, Ling Tosite Sigure, Beck, Puscifer, Sikth, Klone, Deftones, Three Trapped Tigers, Devin Townsend Project, and Twelve Foot Ninja.

Favourite food/drink?
The blood of my enemies… or maybe pizza.  I’ll go with pizza.

Your greatest vice?
Coke Zero.

Favourite film?
Fight Club.

Favourite place in the world?
Bed.  Location irrelevant.

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it be?
Any area that furthers space exploration, which, to be fair, is wide enough to touch on most research areas in some way.

Back in 2006, Moshe Pritsker thought to use video technology to capture and transmit the intricacies of life science research, facilitating both the understanding and reproduction of experiments and techniques. This idea of “letting scientists look over each other’s shoulders” led to the launch of JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which is peer reviewed and PubMed-indexed. As a scientific journal, it has an editorial board and hierarchical structure, and ensures consistent quality of its video content by maintaining a network of professional videographers spread across major science centres. Scientists from leading institutions participate by submitting video articles that visualize their experiments.

As science advances, processes and tools also become more complex. Procedures and techniques such as growing stem cells are tremendously complicated and difficult to accurately follow with just a set of written instructions, and visiting labs in person can be a very expensive alternative beyond the resources of many researchers. This challenge of poor experiment reproducibility is what JoVE tries to address, claiming that traditional written and static picture-based print journals are no longer sufficient to accurately convey the intricacies of modern research. Translating findings from the bench to clinical therapies rely on the rapid transfer of knowledge within the research community.

This month’s issue features an article by Connors et al of Massachusetts Eye & Ear and Harvard Medical School, who have developed an audio-based virtual environment simulator that uses audio cues and a video game context to build cognitive maps of three-dimensional spaces and help blind people improve their navigation skills. Other videos include a new non-invasive method being developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School for measuring brain metabolism in new-born babies, and a demonstration of how a biopolymer gel derived from polysaccharides found in brown algae can help patients with heart failure.

There are also other companies operating in the scientific video space, but what they offer is a looser user-generated environment. One of the most successful of those is SciVee, which is backed by the Public Library of Science and features videos that sit alongside traditional journal papers.

So is this the new frontier? Are we actually looking at a situation where most researchers will feel comfortable communicating with their peers using video? Has the scientific community truly given its blessing to such new approaches to science communication? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

This week we talk to Callum (or Cally to his friends) who’s our QA Team Lead. Before landing at Mendeley he worked in publishing but in his student days he actually used to be a lifeguard. Do tell us more…

“It was probably the most boring job I’ve had, the only time I got to save anyone was when a lady got cramp during aqua aerobics – not exactly Baywatch!”

What made you apply for a job at Mendeley?
I was already working in the industry and liked how Mendeley was disrupting the marketplace

When you started working here, were things like you expected?
I expected a lot more people and processes in place – it’s a real testament to the talent and ambition of people here that we can achieve so much with so few people compared with the big players in the marketplace.

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
Kaizen is an important principle here, so things are always changing.

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
We get a hackday every month to experiment with new technologies and products.

Who would be invited to your perfect dinner party?
Four of my close friends and Oscar Wilde.  We would have a great laugh.

What is the one website you can’t live without?
slashdot.org  - for the pithy comments

When you were growing up, what did you want to be?
A train driver

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
For work(ish) I am reading ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ and for pleasure I’m reading ‘Racing through the dark’, the autobiography of cyclist David Millar

What would you change about the world if you could change one thing?
Free college/university education for everyone

What was the first record you ever bought?  
Bad by Michael Jackson (on cassette)

Favourite food/drink?
Croissants dunked into coffee

Your greatest vice?
I drink far too much coffee in the afternoon

Favourite place in the world?
Saint Julienne en Beauchene (a tiny picturesque village in southern France)

Three things you would put in Room 101
Walking slowly in crowded places, crocs (the shoes), tomato ketchup

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it be and why?
I want to research decision theory in more detail.  I try to use some aspects real options pricing when prioritizing work, but learning more about the theory is something I would love to do – and actually understanding the Black-Scholes model would be nice

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

The latest in our series of blogs featuring the various stars of the Mendeley team talks to its HR and Operations Manager Zuzana Borozova. Everybody here at Mendeley calls her Zuz, but lately the nickname Babushka seems to have stuck. So we ask her about what it’s like working at Mendeley and some of her favourite things…

How long have you been with Mendeley for?
2 years, 3 months

Where did you work before coming to Mendeley?
I was an Intern in the Slovakian Parliament (National Chancellery) while finishing my Masters, then I decided to move to London and worked in all sort of places and roles. My last one before Mendeley was as Office Manager and HR admin at a Software company (Retail) where I got involved in HR thanks to my previous manager.

What made you apply for a job at Mendeley?
No dress code and free beers on Fridays!! Haha it was more the huge task list of the role I applied for (Office Manager and HR Admin) that I was presented with at the interview (I love to be busy).

When you started working here, were things like you expected? How?
I actually had no idea what to expect. I came from a corporate company where relationships with managers were so different from what it’s like at Mendeley. I was actually very nicely surprised by the friendly, lovely attitude of our founders, management and co-workers. Everyone is really cool and good fun to work with!

Have things changed in Mendeley since you started working here?
Oh yes, we have grown so much!! When I started it was just about 30 people, now we’re 53, unbelievable. But it’s more fun, I love it!

What’s the best thing about coming to work at Mendeley?
The jokes in the kitchen in the mornings when we’re making our breakfast and coffees/teas. And the whole atmosphere, it’s great fun

Do you have any pets?
I have a dog (black Labrador called Pluto) back at home in Slovakia, I would love to have one here in London (big breed like a Rotweiller, Ridgeback, or Mastiff) but with my crazy lifestyle the poor dog would be very lonely…

Who would be invited to your perfect dinner party?
Marilyn Manson, Ozzy Osbourne, and my parents (great fun people) and all my Czecho-Slovakian friends – if it’s a party then let’s have a crazy one!

If you could acquire one extra skill or talent, what would that be?
Singing

What book are you reading at the moment and why?
Employment law, because I have just started my CIPD. Believe it or not it’s very interesting!

What was the first record you ever bought?
Hmmm I listened to all sort of crap when I was little (Backstreet Boys- no offense) but if I am thinking about the first record I bought with my own money, it would be Marilyn Manson (Mechanical Animals, great great album)

Favourite hobby?
My number one hobby is Boxing ( I spend most of my time in the boxing gym) and cooking. According to my boyfriend who is a Chef, I am pretty good at cooking.

Favourite food/drink?
Food: pork belly with crackling or halushky (Slovakian traditional dish, a bit like gnocchi with sheep’s cheese and crispy bacon) and drink obviously Czech Pilsner (I also cannot live without coffee)

Your greatest vice?
Using f words a lot…trying to get rid of this

Favourite place in the world?
At the moment it’s the gym (lol), the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to was so far Lomnicky stit (one of the highest peaks in Slovakia- High Tatras, the view is gorgeous!)

Now for a serious one worthy of the Mendeley vision: If you could give unlimited funding and resources to one area of research, what would it be and why?
Cancer research, my best friend’s mum died of a cancer and she had to watch her dying in terrible pain, no one should see their relatives and loved ones suffering.