Month: May 2009

Announcing Science Online London 2009 at the Royal Institution

Jan Reichelt5 Comments

solologoFollowing last year’s successful “Science Blogging 2008” conference in London (see Victor’s blog post), we are happy to announce a slightly rebranded “Science Online London” as this year’s follow-up conference. The event will take place 22 August 2009 at the Royal Institution, London, and is co-hosted by Nature Network, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Mendeley. To accomodate for a wider range of topics (i.e. not only science blogging), we changed the name to “Science Online London”, and we encourage you to suggest topics for the programme.

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

As stated on the Science Online London webpage, “Topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifies and measuring the impact of research.” Subscribe to the newsletter, send us your ideas – and let us know if you want to sponsor the conference. We’re all very much looking forward to meeting you at the Royal Institution on 22 August!

Mendeley Web redesign goes live

victorhenning11 Comments

If you knew the old site, you’ll certainly have noticed already! The main color used to be dark blue with some red-brownish hues. Our goal with the redesign was to make it brighter, airier and less cramped, with the main colors being silver-grey and deep red. We also added better explanations and illustrations of what Mendeley actually is and does!

Here’s the new homepage (the screenshot is actually matched to each visitor’s OS – e.g. if you’re using Linux, the screenshot will show Mendeley Desktop on Ubuntu):

New Mendeley homepage

And here’s the new “How it works” page, which replaces our old “Tour” page.

how-it-works

The redesign isn’t completely finished yet – we’ll be updating many more parts of the site soon, while also adding new features. Please let us know if you catch bugs or design niggles we’ve missed!

What do you think of the new look? Is it pretty enough to want to make you kiss your screen?

Ologeez Founder joins Mendeley / Changing the Journal Impact Factor

victorhenning10 Comments

Exciting news: Jason Hoyt, the founder of Ologeez (a semantic frontend for PubMed), is joining Mendeley! Jason holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University. At the moment, he is still based in Palo Alto, but once the visa issues are sorted out, Jason will be joining us here in London as our new Research Director. TechCrunch broke the story today with a headline that made our geek hearts beat faster, comparing us to a Klingon battle cruiser de-cloaking in London.

To get started, Jason wrote up his reasons for joining us, and how Mendeley can help change the Impact Factor. Over to him:

———————————

Changing the Journal Impact Factor

Right, so the first thing I had to ask myself was “Why on earth would I move from San Francisco, leaJason Hoytving behind a cushy life for London, and work for a reference management start-up?” Surely any rational person would find this a bit odd.

Well, I’m not going to answer by talking about how great the team is or how enthusiastic the founders are about improving research, which is certainly all true. Rather, let’s take a real-world example of how the “tech” behind Mendeley is already making a difference with how we view the impact factors of research.

Read More »

Mendeley Desktop v0.6.5 released

Paul Foeckler20 Comments

After putting the installers on our website last week we now set the auto-update for Windows, Mac and Linux as well. This update adds integration with OpenOffice.org on Windows, fixes several file organiser problems as well as various bugs reported by users. Work is under way on the next update which will include an integrated PDF viewer and many usability improvements to the user interface.

New Features:

  • OpenOffice.org integration on Windows. To setup the OpenOffice.org plugin, restart Mendeley after installing the update and select Tools -> Install OpenOffice Plugin
    OpenOffice.org integration for Linux will be coming soon.

Improvements to Existing Features:

  • Conversion between LaTeX commands for accents and equivalent unicode characters when importing from or exporting to Bibtex
  • Add clickable link under URLs field to open current URL in a browser
  • Add link in Tools menu to install the website importer in your browser which lets you easily import citations from popular websites such as Amazon, Google Scholar and PLoS

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes for various problems when installing the Word plugin
  • Abstract field was not filled in when clicking PubMed lookup button in metadata tab
  • Fixed problem where file organiser did not always respect ‘sort into subfolders’ setting correctly
    on Windows
  • Fixed problem where file organiser could get stuck in an infinite loop, repeatedly copying the same files
  • Show more accurate progress information when organising files
  • Fix author extraction sometimes stripping out lower-case name parts such as ‘van’, ‘der’ etc.
  • Fixed problem on Windows where folder monitoring tried to re-import documents which had been explicitly removed from within Mendeley
  • After sorting the library view, the wrong metadata was shown in the right-hand pane
  • Improved RIS importer’s support for several non-standard fields
  • Fixed crash if a problem occurred loading the data files which support the metadata extraction algorithms
  • Export user’s notes to ‘annote’ rather than ‘note’ field in Bibtex to prevent the problem where the user’s reading notes could appear as part of the formatted citation in the rendered Latex document. Also import ‘comments’ field into the notes field in Mendeley.

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please email support@mendeley.com.