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.

Academia has a reputation for being a bit of a closed world, a walled garden of knowledge where secrets are jealously guarded. But the truth is that collaboration is at the very heart of research and scientific discovery, and that for science to advance, researchers need to get together, compare notes, disagree, and have their ideas challenged and built upon by others. Often this happens naturally – like in the cafeteria where PhD students will chat about their projects – but in such a hyper-specialized environment, chances are that people who share your particular research interests cannot be found in the same institution or even the same country. What then?

In the same way that social media has revolutionised personal and professional communication and created dynamic global conversations, platforms like Mendeley now bring academics together in groups formed around those research interests, and the implications of that are tremendous for making science more open and accelerating the pace of discovery.This is why the team here at Mendeley is particularly interested in gaining genuine, real-time insight into research collaboration.

Mendeley is involved in several research projects. Particularly fruitful has been an on-going exchange of researchers and Mendeley staff between our London HQ and the Know-Center at Graz University of Technology in Austria. All projects aim to contribute to the improved use of the wealth of Mendeley data for the benefit of our users and the scientific community in general.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this recent investigation of research collaboration started as a Hack Day project between Mendeley staff and a visiting researcher from the Know-Center/TU Graz in the context of the TEAM project (http://team-project.tugraz.at) which is coordinated by the Knowledge Management Institute of the TU Graz. Sebastian Pöhlmann (Insights and Analytics Manager) and Piotr Drozd (Community and Business Intelligence Analyst) teamed up with Peter Kraker (PhD student, Know-Center/TU Graz) to visualise cross-country collaboration on the Mendeley platform.

An interactive map has been created that aims to shed some light into the intensity of international research collaboration across different countries. Considering that using Mendeley groups is optional for our users, we are excited to have data on 113 countries. For each of those we show the continent, the rank by user count, the number of connected countries and the proportion of foreign (= international) connections.

By browsing the map or making a selection from the list, you can visualise the connections between researchers for any given country. A connection between two countries is established if at least one of each country’s researchers are members of the same Mendeley group. Of the over 200,000 research groups on Mendeley, we’ve selected private groups with at least two members, as that tends to be the most collaborative group type. Our staff is also very active on the platform so we’ve further excluded groups owned by Mendeley staff  and connections where Mendeley staff are involved. We have further excluded countries with less than 10 total connections.

Browsing the map and the data has produced some interesting insights:

• Among BRICS countries, China, India and Russia have a high proportion of international connections whereas Brazil and South Africa seem somewhat more internally focused
• Generally speaking, North America, Europe, and Australia are very well connected, whereas Asia and South America are somewhat lagging behind.
• There are a few small countries that are very internationalized: Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, and Denmark. Interestingly, these countries are also at the top of the KOF Index of Globalization: http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/static/pdf/rankings_2012.pdf

This is early days, but we hope that by learning more about how our users collaborate with each other, we can continue to develop the best tools to help them work even more efficiently. And by sharing some of the insights on Mendeley Labs we want to contribute our part of the picture to the general knowledge of how research works.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. What does collaboration mean to you and how would you go about measuring and visualizing it?

I recently had the chance to sit down with Barry Bunin to talk about his new drug discovery platform, Collaborative Drug Discovery. As you may guess from the title, he’s taking a novel approach to drug discovery. Modern drug discovery faces huge challenges due to the economic inefficiency of the process where hundreds of millions of dollars must be spent to discover one new drug. The current model also makes it difficult to capitalize on all the interesting but not immediately drug-relevant data that’s generated in the process. CDD’s approach promotes collaboration as opposed to the traditional approach where different teams at different companies repeat much of the same work and suggests that companies will actually share information that leads to a mutual benefit, provided there’s a easy and secure way to do so. I’m delighted to share this interview with you of yet another company showing how openness and collaboration works for business. (more…)

At Mendeley, we’re all about easy collaboration in the cloud, so of course we’re delighted that Hojoki has added us as an activity source. Hojoki lets you see all the activity from all your cloud apps in one shared stream, and share filtered subsets of those activities with colleagues & co-workers. It’s a great way to keep on top of what everyone is doing without having to separately watch Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, Github, and your various Mendeley group activity feeds. It was actually silly fun watching the live feed, too. As people went about their daily work editing documents and scheduling appointments in folders and calendars I’m subscribed to, they showed up in in nearly real-time on my Hojoki feed.

To celebrate the addition of Mendeley (beta only for now), we’re doing a t-shirt giveaway of these awesome shirts featuring the Hojoki robot and Mendeley. Watch #mendeley for your chance to win one & if you haven’t tried Hojoki yet, give it a try.

The “social web” has become the nexus of collaboration and discovery, but how supportive are the existing tools at making leads to scientific discovery? Mendeley co-founder, Jan Reichelt, will show Mendeley’s approach to connecting scholars with information and, by doing so, unlocking it. Mendeley is one of the world’s largest research collaboration platforms, with 750,000 researchers and academics and 65 million research papers indexed in Mendeley’s public research catalog.

Audience members can participate by submitting their questions during the webcast.

Join us on Tuesday, February 15 at 10am PST / 1pm EST by pointing your browser to http://webcast.training.apple.com/.

Webcast ID: MacLearning
Passcode: 379625

This week we have released a new version of Mendeley with some major updates. The major new feature in Mendeley 0.9.8.1 is public collaborative groups.

What are groups?

Groups are a simple way for you to collaborate with your colleagues to create a shared collection of documents. Groups allow members to put together a list of papers and share notes. There are three types of groups:
(more…)

Are you working for a company or institution in the field of science, or do you want to reach the thought leaders in science online? We are looking for sponsorship partners for our Science Online London 2010 conference on 3-4 September (Fri/Sat) at the British Library in St Pancras, London. Last year, our sponsors included institutions and companies like the Royal Institution of Great Britain, CrossRef, NESTA, AAAS/Science, and BioData.

As a sponsor, you will gain exposure to key scientific bloggers, communicators and thought leaders. Given the nature of the audience, we anticipate plenty of media coverage and ‘buzz’ through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and blogs. The conference is a golden opportunity to demonstrate that your company is a supporter of such tools for scientific communication, and a chance to promote your brands, products and services to an audience of passionate communicators.

If you would like to participate as a sponsor of Science Online London 2010 please contact Lou Woodley (l.woodley@nature.com).

Co-hosted by:

During a recent trip to Texas for the Non-hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells meeting, I took a little side trip to the University of Texas at Austin to meet one of Mendeley’s power users. We talked about his research, new projects he is working on and how Mendeley helps him collaborate with his colleagues in South America.

How Dr. Keitt is using Mendeley in his research

Dr. Keitt finds a great deal of value in the collaborative aspects of Mendeley, allowing him to share papers with colleagues distributed around the globe, no matter what OS they use, but he also sees a lot of value in the development of a new citation infrastructure. One application he mentioned here was correction for “citation mutation”, the process wherein a citation gets repeated in successive papers slowly accumulating transcriptional errors until it no longer can be traced back to the original work.

Insights from Integrative Biology

It was really fascinating for me to hear him talk about ecosystem patterns because one of my earliest scientific fascinations was with fractals, a type of pattern found throughout nature. While much of his earlier research involved fieldwork, he’s started doing more molecular work with the advent of better molecular tools for studying and identifying species similarity.

In this respect, large scale biological datasets have become very important to him. One project, which may lead to the creation of a HapMap-style database for non-human species, has made him particularly aware of how idiosyncratic the metadata associated with database entries can be. While having access to larger-scale data has made some scientific questions more tractable, it has also raised its own set of challenges. He gave an example here which I think is instructive for many of the issues scientists are now facing as we put more and more data online and seek effective tools for facilitating collaborations.

In the early days of sequencing, each research group would have their own database with its own structure and that worked just fine, until confusion arose regarding how to refer to a specific sequence and people started to try to merge databases to prevent duplication. We now have the GenBank as a centralized repository for sequence information and sequences can be unambiguously identified by referring to their accession number, but we didn’t get there until editors started requiring that manuscripts reporting sequences contain the Genbank accession number.

Editors forced the issue in this case, but any effort to systematize the reporting of sequences initially would have faced challenges such as who controls the repository and why should a busy researcher bother submitting to it. Repeat that last sentence again, and if you’ve followed any of the discussion about online engagement of scientists with literature, it should sound very familiar.

From Molecules to Ecosystems

Dr. Keitt got his start working in the rainforests of the Amazon where he studied species variance in one of the most diverse ecosystems on planet. Later, he came to the University of Texas where he continues to work on the effect of ecosystem patterning on species diversity. While he no longer does a great deal of fieldwork, he still collaborates with colleagues in South America for ongoing projects. He’s done some work on the Bachman Sparrow in Texas and is really excited about a upcoming project studying coral in Micronesia.

www.keittlab.org/