The Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle to create applications that benefit science is now 30 days in. While more than 1000 developers are now using Mendeley’s APIs, we’re going to mention the 40-or-so official entries into the Binary Battle. This will be a four part series, in which about 10 apps are revealed in each segment. Check back tomorrow for the next 10 apps.

We’ll reveal the Top 10 apps in two weeks. The Top 10 apps will go on to be judged by a panel of experts: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO), John Wilbanks (VP for Science at Creative Commons), James Powell (Thomson Reuters CTO), Juan Enriquez (Managing Directo of Excel Venture Management), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly Media).

Winners announced November 30th!

Now, in order of entry received date along with the developer descriptions, here are the first 10 of 40-ish:

Mendeley Drupal Connector

The Application provides an interface to the popular drupal content management framework and opens a myriad of possibilities to display and interact with publication data though Drupal’s community framework and platform.

BibBase

BibBase was started as a means to minimize the time scientists need to spend on maintaining their publications pages. Something that is seemingly never high enough in the todo list to get done. With BibBase, all a scientist needs to do to keep his page up to date is to update a Bibtex file. Beyond a pretty html page that can be embedded anywhere, BibBase also provides a few other features: an RSS feed of one’s publications, semantic indexing as RDF on data.bibbase.org, and basic usage statistics.

Today, using BibBase has gotten even easier: Using Mendeley for maintaining publications, one doesn’t even need to maintain a BibTex file anymore! The app that I’m hereby submitting uses the open api to retrieve (live) the latest BibTex from Mendeley on demand, every time* someone visits one’s publication page (*document details are cached).

PaperCritic

“We’re a team of two who believe that there is not even remotely enough public discussion in science and so we have come up with an open app for one of the most prominent tasks in the life of a researcher – reviewing and criticizing the work of others.

Following the notion of iterative developing, we have released the app with a minimal set of features, but are looking to extend it with a subscription service for reviews, a trackback server for sciencebloggers as well as anything else that the users will want to see at PaperCritic.

ArticleReader

Article Reader is an HTML5 application powered by Mendeley API, this application lets Mendeley users [view] their articles on the go.
Video demo from the developer:

Scholarley

Scholarley is an initial development release of an Android client for Mendeley; using Mendeley’s Open API. Scholarley is developed with tablets in mind; but a mobile version is bundled with it that should be fairly well optimised for smaller screens.

Mendeley Comparison Grid

Mendeley Comparison Grid’ aims to help you to distinguish your research. When you build up a list of relevant papers, the comparison grid helps you distinguish which papers have done what, when and what they haven’t done. Enabling people to easily see what the gap or difference between your work and others is.
Current version uses the Mendeley ‘tags’ to embed data for your generated grid. As the Mendeley API evolves so will this application.

CitedIn

Citedin finds where you are cited! Some of your papers may have been mentioned where you didn’t expect that to happen: in blogs, databases, Wikipedia. Citedin finds them all. It is provided by the department of Bioinformatics of Maastricht University. The development of the this website is done within the context of a text-mining project funded by the Netherlands Bioinformatics Consortium (NBIC: http://www.nbic.nl).

MuLTiFlow

MuLTiflow is a simple HTML5 editor that has Math and Graphics capabilities with a potential for searching and collating information from multitude of search engines and web services.

rOpenSci

rOpenSci is a collaborative effort to develop R-based tools for facilitating Open Science. RMendeley and rplos are the two software packages that make direct use of the respective APIs. They are wrapped together with other scientific database packages to make the rOpenSci suite, because we believe their greatest asset is when they can be used in synergy with scientific databases. That vision is under active development now, we’d like to thank the sponsors for helping jump start this project and would dedicate any resources we receive to extending the goals of the rOpenSci project. More details on our website.

MendeleyGroupWatcher

Watch Mendeley groups for new documents and notify using libnotify and appindicator. Note, this is a set of source code hosted on Google Code.

OK. That’s it for today! Check back tomorrow to see the next ten apps to make it into the Binary Battle.

Jason Hoyt is Chief Scientist & VP of R&D at Mendeley. Follow him on twitter @jasonHoyt