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.

We wanted to let you know that we’ve made some changes to give our user community a better Mendeley experience. From now on all personal and Mendeley Institutional Edition accounts (apart from the ones that already have unlimited storage) will get a lot more personal library space for storing documents. Here’s how it works:

• Free plan users who currently get 1GB of storage will now get 2GB
• Plus plan and MIE users who have 2GB will now get  5GB
• Pro plan users’ limit will increase from 5GB to 10GB

This applies to all new and existing Mendeley users, and you don’t need to do anything, the new limits should already be in place on your accounts.

And for our dedicated community of Mendeley Advisors all around the world, we’ve also added an extra bonus: Each Advisor will receive – in addition to the increased personal library space – a Team package with 20GBs of group space and an unlimited number of groups with up to 10 collaborators each. This Team package is currently worth £59 ($74) a month, and is something that our community has been asking for, so we’re really pleased to make this available!

Mendeley is a collaborative platform, and we’re always looking at ways to make that collaboration easier, so although we’re only giving these enhanced group features to our advisors at the moment, we’re looking at ways to extend those benefits to all our users in the near future, so watch this space!

In the meantime let us know in the comments below what you think about the upgrades, and if you have any questions as always you can get in touch with support@mendeley.com

Will Mendeley still be free?

Yes! There will always be a free version of Mendeley.

Will Mendeley continue to develop new features?

Yes – we will even become faster, as having access to Elsevier’s resources, partnerships, and reach in the academic, librarian, and professional R&D community will allow us to accelerate our development. Please head over to our feedback forum to vote for your favourite feature suggestions.

What will change for Mendeley’s users?

For starters, we are doubling everyone’s storage space at no cost. Your free Mendeley account now comes with 2GB, Mendeley Plus and MIE accounts get upgraded to 5GB, and Mendeley Pro accounts to 10GB. In the future, we will also start offering you better access to content and additional data, e.g. citation metrics, from within the Mendeley interface.

What will change for users of SciVerse, Scopus, or ScienceDirect?

You can expect seamless interoperability with all of these tools: Exporting documents, references, and data to Mendeley will become much easier. Also, content in SciVerse, Scopus, and ScienceDirect will be enriched with Mendeley’s data, such as recommendations and readership statistics. Lastly, we will be considering special Mendeley premium upgrades for Elsevier customers.

Will there be changes to Mendeley’s premium packages or pricing?

Not in relation to this announcement – we are not planning any price increases to the premium/team packages we are offering today. Of course, we are always reviewing our premium offerings to ensure that they are affordable and meet our users needs, so they will continue to evolve over time.

What happens to my data in Mendeley?

Everything stays the same. You still own your data and can delete it at any point in time. You will always be able to import and export your data locally in standard formats (such as BibTex, RIS, and XML). Additionally, as has always been our policy, Mendeley will continue to offer you private and secure access to your data via our Open API, which means that you will never be tied to Mendeley’s tools and interfaces exclusively.

Will Mendeley continue to offer an Open API?

Yes. In fact, we are in the process further opening up our data and extending third-party developers’ capabilities – there will be more and better data to work with, under the Creative Commons CC-BY license, as before.

Will Mendeley continue to support Open Access and Open Science?

Yes. In fact, Elsevier are accelerating their Open Access initiatives as well.

Will Mendeley keep up its Advisor and Community Programmes?

Absolutely! We will remain as dedicated to our community as before – and Mendeley Advisors will receive a free Team Plan upgrade to enable them to share and collaborate with up to 10 colleagues. Consider the amazing opportunity we have: Mendeley now has access to the resources of the world’s leading science, technical, and medical publisher. We want to hear from you how best to leverage these resources to serve your needs.

Will Mendeley keep working with other publishers?

Yes, most definitely. Mendeley will not favour Elsevier content in our search and recommendation engine. Our discovery tools will remain focused on pointing you to the content that’s the most relevant to you, no matter the publisher or the journal. We will keep working with other publishers to ensure that their content is optimally discoverable and compliant with their terms within Mendeley.

What are Elsevier’s long-term plans for Mendeley?

Mendeley will become Elsevier’s central workflow, collaboration, and networking platform, while we continue on our mission of making science more open and collaborative.

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)

Here at Mendeley we’ve been hard at work trying to improve the product for our community, which now has well over 2 million researchers around the world. This includes a better onboarding wizard that takes new users through the tools available on the platform. The wizard also includes an expanded ‘Claim your Publications’ feature that enables Mendeley to link user profile pages to the wider catalog when they access Mendeley for the first time.

Some might say that this is one of our finest-looking desktops yet, but we’ll leave that judgment to you. As usual, we’ve focused a lot of attention in making the user experience as smooth as it can possibly be, improving looks and flow under windows 8 and fixing a few bugs, including:

• Added options for obtaining help or checking for updates
• More effective display of non-English text in the documents list
• Fixed problem with crashing plugin in Word 2003 and OS X 10.5
• Accurate progress indicator when importing large RIS, BibTeX and EndNote XML files

You can download the new v1.8 Mendeley Desktop here. This version supports Mac OSX 10.5 and above, Linux Ubuntu 10.04, Debian Squeeze or equivalent, and Windows XP SP2 or later. We hope you like the changes, but as always we really value your opinion, so don’t be shy… Let us know what you think in the UserVoice forum, and if you have any problems just contact our support team.

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.

Thank you for participating in our Social Media Week event held at Google New York yesterday. Our panel session addressed scholarly communications and we are thrilled to have hosted it. SMW organizing committee and Google team – you are awesome! (more…)

Mendeley is now settled in our new office space in New York. We are hosting an Office Warming & Open Science Event this Friday November 19th from 6-9pm. We want to invite neighbors and colleagues – if you are interested in Mendeley and the future of open science we welcome you to join.

The evening will be a chance to share ideas, connect with others and get to know the Mendeley team better. Jan, our Co-Founder, will briefly talk about Mendeley’s journey and give an update on what we hope to achieve. The New York team will also introduce themselves along with good food, tasty drinks and fun activities.

Looking forward to meeting you!

We would like to invite you to an exciting event:

Mendeley Talks on November 26th 2010 in Central London

Here’s your chance to listen to Jason Hoyt, R&D and Chief Scientist at Mendeley, talk about how you can get your research noticed:

Getting your research noticed on Mendeley, Google, and everywhere else

Ah! So you’ve finally gotten that manuscript through two rounds of revisions and it’s been published! Or perhaps you haven’t published yet, but you’re considering doing a pre-print. So, what are the best practices in getting that post-print noticed? Or how do you ensure that a pre-print will do its job, but not prevent you from getting a peer-reviewed version as well? Come to find out and also learn how Mendeley ranks your papers in its search catalog and recommendation engine. We’ll also discuss whether boundaries should exist in the extent to which one should promote their research.

Afterwards, you will get the chance to have some fantastic Feuerzangenbowle and chat with Mendeley’s CEO Victor Henning. Otherwise, you can grab a beer and try to beat co-founder Paul Föckler at Foosball.

Of course, this event is completely free, and you are welcome to bring along interested colleagues and friends.

The agenda:
6:30 Drinks and Snacks
7:00 “Getting your research noticed on Mendeley, Google, and everywhere else”, Jason Hoyt
7:30 Open Discussion
7:45 Feuerzangenbowle and Snacks with Foosball and insight to Mendeley
8:30 Official end

November 26th 2010, 6:30 – 8:30pm
144a Clerkenwell Road
White Bear Yard, Ground Floor
London, EC1R 5DF

To RSVP please get back to events@mendeley.com.

With best wishes, and great anticipation,

The Mendeley Team