Month: November 2011

Winners of the first Binary Battle Apps for Science Contest

Jason Hoyt2 Comments

We, along with PLoS, have been overwhelmed by the huge response that academics and the developer community have given to open up science. When we announced this contest to develop science applications on top of the Mendeley and PLoS platforms last March, we were not totally sure that anyone would even be interested. Boy, were we wrong!

Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and one of five all-star judges, said this about the Binary Battle –

“I always tell developers to work on stuff that matters. It’s time to stretch beyond the consumer internet, and what better place to focus than on furthering the cutting edges of science?”

Mendeley launched the API platform in April of 2010 with the hope that it would 1) spur innovation in the science ecosystem and 2) send a signal to others that opening up data benefits everyone. To date, more than 1000 developers have applied for API keys to build on top of that data. With the Binary Battle announcement, we hoped to carry open science further and by all accounts we did.

Today we announce the winners of the 2011 Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. We narrowed the Binary Battle entries down to the Top 10+1, and then handed the voting over to our list of expert judges (Werner Vogels, Juan Enriquez, Tim O’Reilly, James Powell, and John Wilbanks. We also opened the vote up to the public to count as 1/6 and combined with the judges. It was great to see that both the public voting and the judges voting correlated very well. It was so close for many of the apps, but one stood out to both the judges and the public….Read More »

When publishing a research paper, it's best to be sure.

drgunn
Don't Keep Calm and Carry On

Image via blackbeltjones

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of attending Science Hack Day with about 150 other scientists and hackers. It was an amazingly fun event with people from all over the world coming together to build cool, quirky, and otherwise awesome things over the span of a weekend. It’s a sort of high holy day for geeks like me, so I was especially thrilled that Mendeley was able to be a sponsor this year. It was also fun spending quality time with some of the PLoS developers and collaborating on a fun hack. Here’s some of the highlights:Read More »

Calling all Librarians! Questions about Mendeley? Join us for a free webinar and Q&A on 2011-11-22 at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST

drgunn

Calling all librarians and information science professionals! Come learn about how researchers at your institution are using Mendeley and how you can use it to help patrons find what they’re looking for faster. This session is appropriate for folks with no prior experience, but we’ll also go in depth in some areas and there will be plenty of time for questions, so feel free to join just for Q&A if you like. Please download and install Mendeley before the session so if you have any questions, you’ll be able to ask them during the event.

We’ll discuss topics such as:Read More »

Your chance to decide the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle winner

Jason Hoyt

We now have our Top 10+1 Binary Battle apps. We are sending those on to our panel of expert judges: 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).

Now though is your opportunity to voice who should win the battle. We’ll take the aggregate total decided by the public and add that to the judges’ votes to determine the overall winner and runner-up.

You’ll have until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Monday, November 28th, 2011 to get your vote in.

Go to the public vote now

Mendeley is "One to Recognise!"

drgunn

We’ve got another addition to the trophy case here at Mendeley. Fast Track has given Mendeley a “One to Recognise” award. Fast Track champions the UK’s top-performing private companies and entrepreneurs and The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s 100 private tech companies with the fastest growth over the past three years. Co-founder Paul Föckler was presented with the award on the 16th of November and it puts us in very good company. Of course, we couldn’t have done this without the support of the million plus researchers that make our service as valuable as it is, so we are very grateful for the support we have received and are committed to making the next three years even better.

GO Team Mendeley!

The Top 10+1 apps in the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle!

Jason Hoyt

The results are in! Mendeley and PLoS staff both voted on which apps could have the greatest impact on science. We actually had a tie and decided to keep the binary going and include 11 apps to make it a Top 10+1. These apps will now be presented to our worthy judges to determine the overall winner, to be announced November 30th. Our expert judges are: 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).

There were so many great apps, that we also decided to throw in three honorable mentions, who didn’t quite make it into the Top 10+1, but were crowd pleasers. See below the Top 10+1 to find out who made it to the honorable mention list.

More details on the Top 10+1 apps and the Binary Battle are up on our API developer portal, so check that out. And without further ado, here are the Top 10+1 apps… Read More »

Mendeley Desktop 1.3 Preview

Robert Knight5 Comments

A preview of Mendeley Desktop 1.3 is available to test.  You can download it here and see the release notes here.

This update makes it easier to open PDF files in Mendeley Desktop and also lays the groundwork for improved integration between Mendeley Desktop and the research catalog on Mendeley.com.  Internally, we have been spring-cleaning the software to reduce memory usage and improve stability.

Among the changes in this release:

  • You can now open PDF files directly in Mendeley from Windows Explorer / Finder / Nautilus (this also means that it is now possible to set Mendeley to be the default program to handle PDF files if you wish).
  • In the Mac version, you can now drag and drop PDF files onto the Mendeley dock icon.  You can also drag and drop links to PDF files from your browser onto the dock icon and Mendeley will download and open them.
  • Memory usage when importing PDFs has been reduced and file downloads during sync will be faster for many users.
  • Several problems running Mendeley on very recent Linux distributions (Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16) were fixed.  Under Fedora 16 you’ll need to use the –force-bundled-qt command-line argument in order for the software to run.
  • A number of sync bugs relating to folders in groups have been resolved.

Known Issues:

  • Mendeley does not automatically appear in the ‘Open With…’ list in Windows Explorer.  It needs to be added manually.  We will resolve this before the final release.

This release is backwards compatible with the previous 1.1 release.

Please leave any feedback related to the new release on the feedback forum.  You can also tweet @mendeleysupport or email support@mendeley.com

 

Meet the Mendeley Community!

Mendeley

As we cross over into the latter half of the academic semester, I can already tell it’s going to be a great semester for us. We’ve crossed over a million users and have seen millions of documents added in the past few months. This isn’t to toot our own horn, though, because we couldn’t have done it without the support of the wonderful Mendeley community. So I’d like to take a few sentences to thank everyone who has made this our best semester yet.
Read More »

Day 4: Binary Battle Contest App Entries

Jason Hoyt

This is the fourth and final part announcing the top 40-ish Apps entered into the Mendeley-PLoS Binary Battle. To see the first batch of apps, check out Day One. And Day Two with the second batch is here. And Day Three is here.

As a reminder, the top 10 apps will be announced in two weeks and the overall winners will be announced November 30th

Now, in order of entry received date, the final batch of apps to benefit science: Read More »