Tag: Elsevier

How to Avoid Burn-Out When Writing

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Writing is one of the most important forms of communication and has been pertinent in allowing academics to: share their ideas, engage in critical thinking and collaborate with other academics. Sometimes as writers we can encounter various blockers, one of them being complete burn-out. Fortunately, we know that there are ways to ensure we limit the effects of burn-out when we write. 

Admit you’re burned-out. 

Prevention is better than cure and the best way to prevent something is knowing when it is coming. It is important to acknowledge when you are starting to feel overwhelmed and exhausted, it is even more important to know that once you have recognised that, it is okay to take a step back and recharge.  

Prioritise self-care. 

Don’t forget to take care of yourself and your mind.  

  • Take a break; go for a walk, partake in a relaxing hobby or stimulate your mind with a creative activity.  
  • Adjust your schedule; consider shortening your writing sessions or having longer/more frequent breaks.  
  • Set boundaries; figure out where you start hitting a mental block and define your working hours accordingly. 

Get some help. 

It’s okay to get some help, in fact getting help can be incredibly liberating. Whether that is collaborating with fellow academics or using reference management software.  

Mendeley can help you simplify your workflow. With many features that can aid writers at every stage; it not only helps users organise, and easily locate, their references in Mendeley Reference Manager, it also saves users time with its seamless citing capabilities via Mendeley Cite.

Remember, a healthy writer is a productive writer, and Mendeley is happy to help; download Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite today to see how they make writing simple. 

Enjoy an easy and fast route to published journal articles

sallyransom

Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) is an exciting new collaboration that provides researchers with more seamless access to journal articles directly through online research platforms, without any need to use multiple login methods.

The initial pilot has just launched on Mendeley as well as other scholarly platforms, and at present highlights entitlement rights and provides fast links from five major publishers: the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis Group and Wiley. More publishers are expected to join this initial group soon. You might already be able to try GetFTR on Mendeley if your institution has signed up to the relevant access services.

Here’s how it works: Imagine you’re searching for a journal article on Mendeley, GetFTR will add a “View PDF” link beside every article that’s included in your institution’s journal subscriptions. If you’ve recently authenticated at your institution, simply click the link and it will take you straight to the full-text article. If you haven’t authenticated recently, you’ll be directed to your institution’s login page to check your credentials. Providing quick and easy access to knowledge, even when you’re off campus, is now even more important than ever.

GetFTR in action

This pilot will be used to gather feedback on the new service – assessing its accuracy, effectiveness and technical robustness – in order to better meet the needs of researchers. Simultaneously, more research solutions are working on integrating GetFTR.

Elsevier is excited to be part of Get Full Text Research as a publisher and provider of research solutions. We hope Mendeley users who are part of the pilot will enjoy the direct route to articles, and look forward to hearing from you. Please do get in touch with any questions or feedback at support@getfulltextresearch.com.

Mendeley’s participation in this initiative is part of a wider aim to support researchers to easily discover and seamlessly access relevant research. Researchers can visit Mendeley to search over 100million cross-publisher articles, get 1-click access to over 70million PDFs where available and benefit from readership insights and relevant further reading recommendations. Find out more here.

Mendeley’s vision for supporting researchers

sallyransom

Gaby-Appleton-at-MendeleyGaby Appleton is the Managing Director for Mendeley and Researcher Products at Elsevier. She leads an expert product management team in a mission to support millions of researchers with better digital information systems. The aim is to help them have more impact with their work and effectively demonstrate that impact, to stay up to date, to organize and share their knowledge, and to advance their career. She brings over 15 years’ experience to her role along with a passion for the world of research. We met with her to discuss the development vision for Mendeley.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss the development vision for Mendeley. How would you define that vision?

Our vision for Mendeley and indeed for all the Elsevier solutions is to contribute to improving the information system that supports research — an ecosystem of tools and data that addresses real challenges in researchers’ daily reality.

What informs that vision?

Above all, it’s informed by conversations with researchers, which is something I spend a lot of time on. Not that it is a hardship! Spending time with them is truly one of the highlights of my job. Hearing about ground-breaking research from people who are so enthusiastic about what they’re doing is inspirational.

But it’s also essential. The Mendeley team that is responsible for defining our vision needs that open, honest contact with researchers.

Why are those conversations so important?

Because our development strategy has to focus on the problems we can solve for users. If we were doing something because it was exciting technologically but it didn’t address real challenges, then we’d be completely missing the point. We need to ground our development in researchers’ needs.

That’s why we start by listening to gain insight into their challenges, then look at what the technology can do, and finally design solutions to those challenges.

What is the vision for Mendeley’s development that has come out of conversations with researchers?

Based on all the challenges researchers have talked about, we’ve adopted four principles to guide our development strategy: source neutrality, interoperability, transparency, and user control.

Source neutrality means that researchers can use this information system to retrieve, store and disseminate information regardless of the publisher. An unbiased view is the essence of good research and we want to ensure that our platforms and tools are open to content beyond Elsevier’s. Mendeley users can receive recommendations on what to read next (Mendeley Suggest) based on what they’ve already added to their library, and funders-imagethese recommendations are not limited to Elsevier – they can be from any publisher. And we don’t restrict that to papers. Researchers have talked about challenges with staying abreast of funding opportunities, so we’ve worked to provide one of the largest aggregations of funding information, maintaining source neutrality and transparency. The same applies to career postings.

Interoperability is about ensuring that applications, tools and data sets from different providers can work together. The Mendeley API represents our commitment to interoperability with any tools that researchers need.

Transparency is vital to researchers. If they receive an alert or recommendation, they need to know what prompted it. Otherwise, they can’t know if it’s relevant without spending time assessing it. If they are looking at search results, it’s great if they can see how their search string relates to those results. That helps with filtering and refining the hit set. An example of how we maintain transparency is in the functioning of Mendeley Suggest. It makes recommendations for further reading based on what a user and their colleagues are reading, but crucially, it includes information about why that article is relevant.

Control is all about giving researchers control of their own data, where it’s shared and how it’s used by the system. If they don’t want their data to be visible beyond a select group of users, or they don’t want their behavior to provoke recommendations, they should be able to opt out of those features. User control is all about making it easy for an individual to find the settings for preferences. A good example in our system is Mendeley Data, which makes it easy for users to define exactly who sees their data. Similarly, the organization, privacy and recommendation settings of researchers’ reference manager library are easy to control. What displays in a Mendeley Profile is entirely at the user’s discretion.

That’s where our development team constantly strives to take Mendeley: to keep it open to content from any source; to make sure its application programming interface is compatible with multiple tools and platforms; to give users insight into how its features make recommendations; and to ensure that it’s easy for users to set their preferences.

You’re currently developing a new reference manager, now available in BETA, which is a completely re-platformed and updated version of Mendeley’s core reference management function. How does it align with this vision for Mendeley?

I’ll leave it to my colleague Laura Thomson, our Head of Reference Management, to talk about the new Mendeley Reference Manager in more detail in her upcoming interview. Briefly, reference management tools are what we’re best known for. Mendeley Desktop is now ten years old and, while it’s developed incrementally over that time, to really act on users’ feedback and make some big improvements, we felt we needed to take a new RNS_963_a.General version image (2)approach and take advantage of new technologies that have become available since the original Mendeley Desktop was built.

The new Mendeley Reference Manager remains free-to-use and publisher agnostic. The Mendeley API remains open, allowing researchers and developers to create interoperability with multiple tools. We’ve ensured that the settings for the library, recommendations and so on are transparent and in researchers’ control. It’s unique in satisfying those four aspects of the vision for an information system supporting research.

Every aspect of Mendeley follows the same principles and is informed by real-world conversations: from reference management through data sharing to showcasing impact.

We would never pretend that we have all the answers, but we listen. We’ll continue to communicate with researchers as we work on each application of Mendeley. Our goal at Elsevier is an information system that supports research, and Mendeley aims to remain a core part of that.

Thank you very much for your time.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Find out more about all-things Mendeley here

Find out more about the information system supporting research here 

Mendeley & E-PIC event in Austria on November 21st and November 22nd

Christian DeFeo

What helps researchers to do their jobs? How can you best organize your documents, generate citations and bibliographies in a whole range of journal styles with just a few clicks? We offer you the chance to get to know Mendeley in Austria – at TU Vienna (Nov 21st) and TU Graz (Nov 22nd).  You will hear about the enablement of reference management, support of international collaborations and researcher data insights.

Register Now

 The program:

  1. Welcome and Introduction
    Presented by: Jürgen Stickelberger, Account Manager Elsevier
  2. Overview of researcher and institutional solutions
    Presented by: Giovanna Bartens, Market Development Manager, Mendeley

    • Mendeley at a Glance
    • Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE)
    • Live demo – Mendeley key features
    • Your research community within Mendeley
  3. Break
    • Mendeley Updates – Roadmap and Developments
    • Presented by: Virginie Wagenaar, Product Manager MIE
  4. Introduction to Elsevier Product Insights for Customers (E-Pic)
    Presented by: Chinmay Panigrahi, Product Manager E-Pic Q&A

 

TU Vienna:

Tuesday, November 21st
13:00 am– 16:00 pm

Contact person:
Ingrid Haas

Location:
Vortragsraum der Universitätsbibliothek
der TU Wien
Resselgasse 4, 5. OG
1040 Vienna

Austria

TU Graz:

Wednesday, November 22nd
10:00  am – 13:00 pm

Contact person:
Dr. Ulrike Kriessmann

Location: 
Bibliothek und Archiv der TU Graz,
Seminarraum BZK1012, 1.KG
Technikerstr. 4
8010 Graz

Austria

 

For further question please contact:

Tanja Giessner
Customer Marketing Manager
A&G Europe (Europe Central)
t.fischer.1@elsevier.com
t + 31 20 485 2366

Introducing Elsevier DataSearch – Beta Two

Christian DeFeo2 Comments

Elsevier DataSearch has been updated and improved.

Introduction

Elsevier DataSearch (https://datasearch.elsevier.com) is a data search engine that allows scientists and researchers to search for many different data types and formats across a variety of domain-specific and cross-domain institutional data repositories and other data sources. Results display datasets in a unified way to facilitate finding relevant and useful research data, and allowing users to quickly preview and assess data in-situ before viewing in the destination repository.  By generating previews of the actual data inline (e.g., spreadsheets, images, interactive maps, etc.), DataSearch helps users scan through multiple potentially interesting datasets much faster.  DataSearch indexes both metadata and data to facilitate the matching of queries to objects described in the research.

DataSearch is one of the complementary offerings in Elsevier’s Mendeley Data Platform for Institutions.

Beta Two

After the initial launch in June 2016, we gathered feedback from users to make iterative improvements in the search experience, especially around relevancy and ranking.  Users can also facet by data type, data source, data source type and publication date. Development is in progress to soon allow users to facet by subject classification, based on Elsevier’s OmniScience taxonomy.

Data sources covered by DataSearch now include:

Many more data sources will be added in the coming months, including life sciences repositories.

If you would like to have your institution’s data repository, local data and /or local active data indexed by DataSearch, please contact us at datasearch-support@elsevier.com

APIs

DataSearch has a “Pull” API that allows users to embed DataSearch results and data previews in their applications. Development is in progress for a “Push” API that will soon allow any repository to push data directly to DataSearch to make it discoverable and previewable.

New Look, New Sign In

Christian DeFeo

Updates to your Mendeley Sign In Experience

Starting this month, we’ll be making upgrades to your sign in experience; this will take place across our entire product range: web, mobile, and desktop.

New look Mendeley sign in

You’ll now only need one account to access the entire Mendeley and Elsevier ecosystem, thus minimising the number of sign in credentials you’ll need to remember.  It will also streamline your user experience, and allow us to deliver improved services to you in the future.

Some users will need to update their accounts. If you do, you’ll be prompted to go through our quick and easy verification process to ensure the security of your account and update your details.

If you experience any issues signing into your Elsevier account please check out the FAQs here or contact the Support Team.

If you have any feedback about the new sign in experience, please feel free to reply directly on this thread!

Changes to the Elsevier manuscript sharing policy: how they affect Mendeley & you

drgunn

On April 30th, Elsevier updated its policies regarding how Elsevier papers may be used to more closely align with the STM Association principles and to address usage on social networks, which have become popular since the last time the policy was updated (yeah, it was that old!) For Mendeley and other sites on which research is shared, the main thing is that there are fewer restrictions on what sorts of use are permitted, but we also get some technical help with a new article tagging proposal.

What it means for a Mendeley user

The day-to-day experience of a researcher using Mendeley won’t change. We plan to use the new machine-readable information in the PDFs to improve our catalog search, recommendation features, and article-level information available via the Mendeley API. We would also like to encourage researchers to add the new author manuscripts to their researcher profiles.

While we continue to dream of and work towards a world where all research is available to anyone without restriction, this is a welcome step forward. At Mendeley, we worked closely with Elsevier to ensure these changes help the whole scholarly communications ecosystem – researchers, publishers, librarians, and developers of new technology – and found Elsevier a willing and forthcoming partner in our work to meet the changing needs of of researchers. For any new startups that have bold new ideas about how to make research better, get in touch with Alicia or Alexandra – they don’t bite!

What we like about the policy

  • We like that the policy is much simpler to understand. The old policy was complicated and had all sorts of exceptions. Simpler policies allow us to provide a better user experience.
  • We like that the policy is not too prescriptive re: sharing platforms. The online world changes rapidly and it’s good that Elsevier is signaling willingness to work with existing sites and whatever YikYak-for-research might be yet to come.
  • We like that author manuscripts have a CC license applied. This helps remove the uncertainty about reuse permissions.
  • We like that the policy isn’t just words – a proposed new standard for article tagging, to be developed in collaboration with sharing platforms and other publishers, will make it easier for us to build advanced search and discovery features, as well as to provide better article usage stats to Scopus, Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics, etc. Importantly for stats, the machine-readable tags will now include information such as article license & document version.

The above changes aren’t just good for us, they’re good for everyone – Mendeley user or not. We understand that researchers need a range of tools and services to support their work, so we worked hard to ensure these changes help the whole scholarly communications ecosystem – researchers, publishers, librarians, and developers of new technology. Of course, we’re on the progressive end of things at Mendeley, so there are some parts of the policy we don’t feel goes far enough.

What we don’t like about the policy

  • The author manuscript embargo. We believe that libraries and researchers will still value the permanently archived, DOI-linked, more readable and fully-citable version of record, regardless of the prevalence of author manuscripts. We’re not alone in our dislike of this, either. Harnad and Kevin Smith single this out as the main issue. Here’s the thing – it’s entirely reasonable for Elsevier to worry that IR copies might end up substituting for publisher copies. If librarians and researchers do actually value the permanently archived, DOI-linked, and variously enhanced version of record, you need to make your voices heard on this so that we can get policies based on evidence and demand, not worry and risk projections.
  • The NC-ND bit of the Creative Commons license on author manuscripts. The NC license will create confusion about use of the work in academic settings and the ND license will cause uncertainty in applications such as text-mining. For what it’s worth, we have been told the license isn’t intended to restrict use in classrooms or text mining.
  • The distinction between commercial and non-commercial sites. We don’t like that for-profit enterprise is singled out as if we’re somehow more risky to partner with. Mendeley reached out to Academia, ScienceScape, MyScienceWork, Pubchase, Sparrho and others for guidance as we worked with Elsevier, and their feedback has helped shape the policy. We would therefore like to suggest that the disdain we sometimes encounter within academia for for-profit enterprise is misplaced.

    • Overall, we think the positives outweigh the negatives. Though there’s bound to be some cases where one particular part of the policy has an outsized and unforeseen effect – this is inevitable when trying to restrict use of digital content – they are not presenting this policy as cast-iron and immutable for the next decade, so please let them know if some part of the policy is really ill-suited to your particular application.

    There’s one other thing we’d like to mention. It’ll do no good if this overture from Elsevier is ignored or repudiated, so we’d also like to suggest that criticism of the policy be done with a fresh set of eyes. We’re not suggesting that the past be forgotten and we’re certainly no stranger to grand-standing and revolutionary rhetoric, but we also think good behavior should be rewarded if there is to be more of it. Embargo aside, this does lift the burden somewhat on those trying to innovate in the scholarly communications space, so that’s why it is, on balance, a positive step forward in our eyes.

    Newsflo brings new impact metrics to Mendeley

    Alice Bonasio

    NewsfloSome exciting news has just come through, in that Elsevier has acquired Newsflo, an innovative service that helps academic institutions keep track of all their media coverage and social media mentions, boosting the visibility of researchers and their work.

    Whereas traditionally academia has been very insular in the way they measured impact of its research output – think “walled garden” and the tyranny of citation count – these days it is increasingly accepted that citations alone are not the most accurate way of determining the reach and usefulness of research. We’ve seen the rise of Altmetrics and Mendeley has contributed a lot to this, collaborating with others to provide readership statistics that offer the research community much more relevant and granular insight on how and where their papers are being discovered, read, annotated, shared and cited.

    Newsflo takes this a step further, looking beyond scholarly use of research papers towards a “media impact metric” that can be used to measure societal impact. This certainly makes sense if you consider that the purpose of Science is, after all, to benefit the whole of humanity, and that involves effectively communicating scientific research to the general public through various media. But in a world of information overload and seemingly infinite social media channels, how do you keep track of your work once it’s released into the wider world?

    That was the problem that Imperial College London PhD students Ben Kaube and Freddie Witherden set out to solve when they started Newsflo. They developed a tool that helps researchers and academic institutions to measure the wider impact of their work by tracking and analyzing media coverage of their publications and findings. Currently Newsflo tracks over 55,000 English-speaking global media sources and has the technology and network to expand to non-English language media. Newsflo applies this intelligence to mine emerging trends in the academic sector and to provide relevant media alerts.

    We aim to keep researchers informed of the media interest in their work, but also to help them raise their profiles, without putting extra demands on their time. Our tool lets institutions showcase the value of their research, and being a part of Elsevier will allow us to integrate our media monitoring technology into researchers’ everyday workflow.  Ben Kaube,  Newsflo Co-founder 

    Now that Newsflo has joined the Elsevier family, we will be working to incorporate all these cool features into your Mendeley profile, providing individually customized evidence of the societal impact of your research through media mentions. Also, through the ongoing integration of Mendeley with Elsevier’s existing platforms, Newsflo’s media monitoring feature will become an integrated part of the workflow of all researchers publishing with Elsevier, along with tools such as the article recommender.

    It’s increasingly important for researchers and departments to be able to demonstrate societal impact in order to attract students and secure funding. The technology and expertise of the Newsflo founders will be great assets to Elsevier in continuing to advance our portfolio of innovative tools to support institutional leaders and researchers’ workflows and careers. Olivier Dumon, Managing Director of Research Application & Platforms at Elsevier

    You’ve seen already some of the benefits that this type of integration can bring, where we brought in features such as the article recommender and those that let you easily export papers from Science Direct or see your Mendeley Readership stats directly from Scopus. Our recently revamped API makes it much easier for all these services, across Elsevier but also 3rd party developers, to integrate with each other. We believe the key to building the best possible user experience for researchers is to seamlessly bring together all the information, content, workflow tools and social/collaboration functionalities that they need, and we’re working hard towards that goal.

    It’s also really exciting to welcome these talented young entrepreneurs and work with them to develop some great new features together. Being acquired is an amazing and very challenging journey for a startup, but I think we’ve shown just how many opportunities it can bring, and I’m looking forward to helping Newsflo make the most of it so that their product can be of greatest benefit to the research community. Jan Reichelt, Mendeley President 

    Co-founders Victor Henning and Paul Foeckler also stayed on following the acquisition, with Victor remaining as CEO of Mendeley but taking on an additional role as VP of Strategy at Elsevier. He’s currently spearheading innovative collaboration initiatives such as Axon@LeWeb, which brings together the most promising emerging startups in the fields of Science and Research. Paul, meanwhile, is involved in developing a new Elsevier Open Access journal that covers all disciplines, an initiative that promises to make the process of submitting your work for publication much easier and more efficient.

    We think these are exciting times indeed, but as always we’d love to hear from you with any thoughts, suggestions, praise or criticism. Leave a comment below or Tweet us at @Mendeley_com

    Mendeley Debates At Cambridge : Do We Need A ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ ?

    Alice Bonasio

    GabeHughes 1

    By: Gabriel Hughes, VP Web Analytics at Elsevier

    Images © Chris Williamson, courtesy of the Cambridge Union Society 

    Should we have the right to require websites to ‘forget’ or ‘delete’ stories and posts about us which we find embarrassing or just don’t want other people to see? Should people be able to force search engines to remove links to information like that? Do individuals need more legal powers to control their personal data online?

    As a growing technology company based in London, Mendeley finds itself drawn into many of the great debates facing the technology sector in Europe today, and we take this responsibility very seriously.

    Debate2

    This October, we were proud to sponsor the prestigious Cambridge Union Society as it debated the ‘The Right To Be Forgotten’, a contentious issue following recent legal developments in Europe.

    Under a ruling made in May, in a case brought against Google, European citizens may now demand that search engines remove links to online public information about them. This is the current legal interpretation of the ‘right to be forgotten’, a concept which has been debated for some years and is outlined in the EU’s Data Protection Directive drafted back in the 1990s. This ethical and legal issue is still evolving and whatever finally emerges is likely to have far reaching implications for the internet for many decades to come.

    I entered the debate from my personal position, one that is also informed by my experience working at Google, which is of course the company most significantly affected by this new ruling. My fellow teammates in opposition were the MP for Cambridge Julian Huppert,  Mariam Cook, CEO of Position Dial, and Alistair McCapra, CEO of Chartered Institute of Public Relations. The side in proposition of the motion was led by David Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the Information Commissioner’s Office, and also included Jon Crowcroft,  Professor of Communications Systems at Cambridge, Gavin Phillipson, Chair of Law at Durham University and also Emma Carr, Director of Big Brother Watch. Each of these expert speakers brought considerable depth of knowledge and unique perspectives to this complex issue.

    debate

    My argument in opposition was based not on a disagreement with the right to privacy or control over one’s personal information, quite the contrary. It focused on the deep flaws in the recent European court ruling, which targeted search engines and technology companies, who are not responsible for what publishers and individuals post online. A perverse outcome of the ruling is that in asking Google to delete a link to something you do not like, they are put in a position where they alone have to judge whether it is in fact right for them to do so, leaving the publisher under no obligation to delete the offending post itself. The information remains online, and search engines are forced into a censorship role which few can defend.

    In my opinion, search engines are just a part of the navigational infrastructure that enables the internet to function, together with social networks, wiki pages, feeds and the hypertext link itself, and this ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling confuses navigational linking technology with the content that it points to. Nobody seems to think it is a good idea to force Google into this new Big Brother role where it now tries to arbitrate what websites can share online, and this new right turns the neutral and automated role of a search engine on its head.

    The opposing team also pointed out that many of the worst cases where private or embarrassing information has been posted online are already covered under data protection, harassment and privacy laws. New laws have a habit of creating unintended consequences that could lead us down a dark path of censorship and excessive regulation, they warned.

    Debate 4

    In the end, this team opposing the right to be forgotten won the debate. Before entering the debate chamber 40 per cent of the audience indicated they supported the motion ‘this house supports the right to be forgotten’, but after hearing the debate, the balance of the vote had shifted against, with the ‘nay’ side winning by 35 per cent to 30.

    Yet the debate highlighted the complexity of the issue and this was reflected in how close the vote ended and in how many felt compelled to abstain. Indeed, one audience member spoke up ask whether the debate was about the principle of the Right To Be Forgotten, or the actual right in law now defined by the Court of Justice of the European Union. Some of those arguing in support of the proposition did not seem to think search engines should be targeted and distanced their arguments from the court ruling. Likewise, those speaking against the motion acknowledged the real concerns of many people about how their data is used online.

    It seems a balance has to be struck between opposing demands. An absolute right to be forgotten, allowing everyone complete control over what information about them should be published online, makes no sense. There are too many politicians who have over-claimed expenses, doctors who have been sued for malpractice, and bankers who have been convicted of fraud. If there are to be more legal powers to control what information about you is out there, then everyone accepts there have to be counter-balancing limitations in defence of freedom of speech and freedom to know.

    Debate 3

    At the same time, we all have to recognise that our society is going through a period of enormous change, whereby more data than ever is collected about our day-to-day life. We are moving too close to the point where almost every waking moment of our lives is recorded online, and can potentially be shared or made public. The volumes of data about us that are being collected and stored are truly immense and unprecedented in our history.

    Given this, the truth is that our society does need to evolve new mechanisms, both technical and maybe even legal, to ensure that individuals are empowered to better manage their privacy and identity online. The challenge will be doing this in such a way that we do not introduce censorship, and an Internet plagued by legal disputes over what should or should not be online. Reflecting on the debate, it looks very much like we do need new solutions, but perhaps just not this one.

    Jan Reichelt

    As Jan Reichelt, President and Co-founder of Mendeley, made clear in his introduction, we have a firm ethical policy to preserve data protection and privacy for our users. We also believe in the power of technology innovation to solve the very toughest problems, often powered by data that our researchers and the scientific community creates. We will continue to support the great debate about to balance these interests, so we can support both freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

    Interested to contribute to the debate ? Tweet us at @Mendeley_com or @gabehughes #RTBF

    Mendeley API Version 1 is Out!

    Alice Bonasio

    Mendeley Dev Portal 1

     

    It has been a long 12-month journey, and the path wasn’t always lined with rose petals and unicorns, but last week we did allow ourselves a small celebration as version 1 of the Mendeley API was released.

    API Celebrations

    The API team designed this from the ground up, working alongside other Mendeley and Elsevier teams as well as key external partners, who all helped to test it out and provided crucial feedback to bring it into shape.

    Mendeley users have already seen some of the results of this work, with better, seamless integration with Scopus and Science Direct in features such as the Web Importer and Readership Stats. This is something that Elsevier is really supportive of, as it provides an open platform to improve and optimise the research workflow at every step. The API is a key piece of that puzzle and we’re excited to see the new innovative applications it will lead to. If you’re a developer, be sure to check out the Mendeley Dev Portal and give the new API a whirl!

    You can read more about this in our dedicated Mendeley Dev blog, and about API’s in general in this Huffington Post Article. As always, don’t be shy of letting us know what you think in the comments, Twitter or just email api@mendeley.com