Happy New Year from everyone at Team Mendeley! We’re excited to be back from the holidays and buzzing with ideas. We’ve got a couple of newsworthy bits, but that’s for another post.

This one is about a research proposal we submitted in December, trying to get selected by the Research Information Network for a commissioned study on the “Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers” (Mendeley, anyone?). It was a joint effort with Gavin Baker/SPARC, Jonathan Gray/Open Knowledge Foundation, Niall Haslam/European Molecular Biology Lab, Liz Lyon/UKOLN and Cameron Neylon/Science and Technology Facilities Council. As the lone social scientist on the team, my main task would have been to oversee the empirical survey and conduct the statistical analysis and structural equation modelling.

Unfortunately for us, even though we were invited into the final round of presentations at RIN, our bid did not get selected. I can understand (and agree with) the reasoning that RIN gave us – they thought we had a great team and compelling methodology, but we hadn’t given as much thought to the nuts and bolts of the project management as they would have liked. Nonetheless, it was a great learning experience (Gavin has blogged about this, too), and I genuinely enjoyed working out the proposal with the other team members. Getting into the final round wasn’t too shabby either, considering that none of us had ever written a proposal for such a research tender.

Sincere congratulations to the winning team from NCeSS/University of Manchester and ISSTI/University of Edinburgh!

In the spirit of Web 2.0 collaboration and sharing, our team had planned to make our proposal (and had we been selected, our ongoing work and raw data) public for everyone to access and re-use. So here’s the proposal we submitted:

Tender: Use and relevance of web 2.0 resources for researchers http://documents.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=9402283&access_key=key-2nshgydkyl0eng7q5aby&page=1&version=1&viewMode=