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…)

The Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle to create applications that benefit science is now 30 days in. While more than 1000 developers are now using Mendeley’s APIs, we’re going to mention the 40-or-so official entries into the Binary Battle. This will be a four part series, in which about 10 apps are revealed in each segment. Check back tomorrow for the next 10 apps.

We’ll reveal the Top 10 apps in two weeks. The Top 10 apps will go on to be judged by a panel of experts: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

Winners announced November 30th!

Now, in order of entry received date along with the developer descriptions, here are the first 10 of 40-ish: (more…)

Research is hard enough without having to deal with crappy software and programs that don’t talk to one another. Part of the problem is that many people who write great code aren’t scientists, so they don’t know what scientists need. We’d like to solve that problem, so we’ve teamed up with the Public Library of Science to issue a “Call for Apps“.

If you have a great idea for a scientific app but lack the coding skills to develop it, you’re in luck! Submit your app idea by August 10th (12pm PDT) and we’ll present it to developers who have the skills to make your dream a reality using the PLoS and Mendeley APIs, which are rich sources of data on scientific trends and stats.

Here are some ideas:

• Visualize research trends
• Mine PLoS articles for statistically relevant words or phrases using the Solr API or get paper stats from the article metrics API.
• Readermeter is an example of an app making good use of Mendeley’s readership data.

What’s the thing you wish someone would make an app for? We’ve got the data, you’ve got the idea, and chances are there’s someone who wants to bring your idea to life, if they only knew what you needed.

How To Submit Your App Idea:

• Complete the Binary Battle App Idea Submission form
• Leave a comment on this blog post with your ideas
• or just tweet your idea using the #binarybattle hashtag

If you’re a developer, you may wish to enter your completed app in the Binary Battle.

Two weekends ago, a group of developers and designers gathered at the Adobe offices in downtown San Francisco to work on data visualization projects taking open data sets and fusing them in creative ways to yield new insights. swissnex San Francisco and Creative Commons organized the event and datasets were provided by Infochimps and Factual and judges were brought in from some of the top design firms and startups in SF and Europe, such as Stamen, LUST, Color, and Square. About a hundred developers and designers showed up for the event, and 20 teams competed in the event. Given such strong competition and high standards, I was really thrilled when my team was chosen as the best data mashup! Here’s what we did… (more…)

Photo by Rui Pereira

Do you dream of creating the Blippy for BriteKite, or the Gowalla for GetGlue? No? Well, maybe you’re thinking beyond better ways to sell stuff to people and wanting to try something a little bigger. You wouldn’t be alone. Universities, governmental bodies, and companies have increasingly begun to make their data available to the public and they want it to be used! All we need now is for smart developers to realize there’s as much money and considerably more fame to be had in helping people find the next cure for cancer or spotting public health issues than in spotting buy-one-get-one deals at the local store. Please join us on June 11th and 12th for Hack4Knowledge. (more…)

Mendeley blog via DOM Visualizer

This week’s update could be the start of something big. At Mendeley, we know that as you read, annotate, share, and organize research documents, your knowledge and expertise is encoded in your collection. Decisions such as what groups a paper belongs in, what tags are meaningful for a paper, and whether or not you’ve read the paper through to the end are all important signals about how important a given paper is and how it’s related to others. Our mission at Mendeley is to help you leverage this latent information to more effectively organize, share, and discover research. Today, we’ve taken an important step in this process by using tags to group related documents and groups together, and we’ve also added a wiki-like page for each tag to describe the concept the tag represents and to link to related concepts. Intrigued? (more…)

Photo by Rémi Menegon

As the summer arrives, you may be thinking about taking some time off, maybe going to the beach to do something about that unhealthy pallor you acquired poring over the literature this past semester. Forget all that. Go buy some Vitamin D and come back inside, because I know exactly how you should spend the summer months. Geeking out with the Mendeley research data, that’s how! Mendeley has data on 85M research papers including who’s writing about what, who’s reading them, and where they’re being published. We want to give you $10001 for doing something really cool with all that data. The big announcement was back in March, applications have been rolling in, and now Amazon has chipped in free AWS credits for everyone taking part, with a big pot of credits for the winner.
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Since we recently announced our $10001 Binary Battle to promote applications built on the Mendeley API (now including PLoS as well), I decided to take a look at the data to see what people have to work with. My analysis focused on our second largest discipline, Computer Science. Biological Sciences (my discipline) is the largest, but I started with this one so that I could look at the data with fresh eyes, and also because it’s got some really cool papers to talk about. Here’s what I found: (more…)

A useful way to keep your contacts up to date on what you’re doing online is to have services tweet out your activity. Now Mendeley will send tweets on your behalf if you add a publication to the “My Publications” folder or comment or like something in a public group newsfeed. You can activate this on your Account Settings page and pick and choose which activities you’d like to have tweeted on your behalf.

Another small but useful change is the addition of permalinks to activity feed items, making it easier to call attention to a specific item in the feed. You’ll find those attached to the date for each item. We’ve also made lots of under-the-hood fixes and improvements to the API. Please note that with this release, we’re also officially dropping support for IE6.

This Wednesday saw a mostly behind-the-scenes update, but there are a few things that are very useful: embeddable groups, web download links for private groups, and raised API limits for app developers. (more…)