As of this week, with a single click, you will be able to follow other researchers on Mendeley to stay on top of what they are doing and see what they are publishing. You will see activities relating to researchers you follow on your Mendeley web dashboard. Similarly, your own publications will reach a much wider audience as others follow you.

This is going to replace the current contact-based model, where you had to accept contact requests explicitly.

But wait, what about privacy?

We take that very seriously of course, so it’s important to say that with this change, we are not making publicly visible anything that was not public before. For example, no other users will see what you are reading in your library. In addition, based on feedback, we also decided to introduce the protected profile option, which lets you control who can follow you. Like on Twitter, your default option will be open, but you can also easily modify this by going into your privacy settings so that only approved users can follow you.

As you know, Mendeley is not only about the tools that help you format your citations, organize your documents, and generally manage your research workflow. That’s all really good, of course, and rest assured we’re not about to drop the ball on that side of things, but what makes Mendeley different is the fact that we’re also a social platform where researchers from all over the world can collaborate.

We’re excited about this feature because it’s another step in making Mendeley even more social, and it means that it will now be easier for our users to find, get in touch and collaborate with others who share their research interests. We believe in making science more open and collaborative, and anything that brings members of our research community together has to be a good thing. We hope you enjoy connecting with other researchers on Mendeley and really want to hear what you think of this change, so please get in touch!