Stats is becoming part of your Mendeley profile

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Shruti Desai

stats

Stats is changing from being a private dashboard (only you can see) to being a part of your profile so that, as well as showcasing your work, your profile also shows the exposure and impact your work is having.

The features currently shown on the stats overview page will be shown in a tab in the profile: aggregated publication metrics (h-index, views, citations, readers), aggregated view and citation timeline and media mentions.

Your profile will show a single list of all your publications, where:
• you control which publications are showcased to viewers of your profile;
• we show you (and only you) a detailed view of the impact each of your publications is having individually.

Just like now, you control who sees your profile, and this will include your new stats tab. Your profile is public by default, with an option to make visible to only your followers, and an additional option to restrict your followers to only those you give permission to.

Mendeley integrates with ORCID — uniquely identify your research

November 30, 2016November 30, 2016 Shruti Desai1 Comment

ORCID ID

Searching for research is now easier than ever — but how do you know whose research you’re reading? Is the piece by John A. Smith, the Harvard researcher, or by John A. Smith, the internet blogger?

Mendeley is integrating with ORCID, the Open Research Contributor ID non-profit, to bring your unique research identification to your Mendeley profile.

Since it’s launch in 2012, ORCID has issued over 2.5 million unique identifiers to help researchers keep the record straight on what work is whose.

The integration is already live — you can create or connect your ORCID ID with your Mendeley profile today!

Verified integration

ORCID Auhorisation You’ll can link your existing ORCID account or create a new one, and you’ll have a choice whether to import your ORCID profile information into your Mendeley profile.

Future plans

For now, that’s a one-off import, but we are working with ORCID on how to keep your profiles in sync, so you don’t have to keep filling the same information in again and again.

The FAIR side of Mendeley Data

November 28, 2016November 28, 2016 Shruti Desai

Mendeley hosts a Hack Day aimed at making Mendeley Datasets accessible by FAIR

Earlier this year we launched Mendeley Data, an open data repository where researchers from all disciplines can deposit their datasets. Because we want to support all fields of science, we allow all file formats, and are flexible in the kinds of metadata researchers have to provide. However, we still want to ensure that it is easy for others to find the data, access the data, and work with the data.

That’s where FAIR comes in. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable and is an approach for data developed since January 2014 by a wide range of scientific and research data organisations including the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL), and which Elsevier and Mendeley and others support strongly.

In the FAIR Data approach, data should be:

Easy to find by both humans and computer systems, with metadata that allow the discovery of interesting datasets;
Stored for long term such that they can be easily accessed and/or downloaded with well-defined license and access conditions, whether at the level of metadata, or at the level of the actual data content;
Ready to be combined with other datasets by humans as well as computer systems;
Ready to be used for future research and to be processed further using computational methods.

Community organizations and funding agencies are starting to recognize the importance of data being FAIR; for example the European Commission is providing researchers that receive funding through Horizon2020 with FAIR data management guidelines.

Mendeley Data wants to support researchers making their data available in a FAIR manner and so we’re delighted to be able to collaborate with the DTL, who are developing FAIR tools.

Hacking the data

Last Friday developers from DTL joined the Mendeley Data developers for a Mendeley hack day. The goal for the hack day was to extend Mendeley Data API, to be able to expose the FAIR metadata, which allows researchers to discover datasets in Mendeley Data based on detailed metadata attributes.

The end goal is that a researcher using a FAIR-enabled tool can carry out a detailed search operation (for example search for datasets about a particular disease condition) and find relevant results from a range of repositories, including Mendeley Data.

In order to enable this, ultimately, we need to create an endpoint which exposes detailed metadata for our datasets. We knew this would be a tall order for our hack day, so we created a proof-of-concept endpoint which exposed this metadata for some static/hardcoded instances of collections and datasets.

This was enough to show the FAIR Data Point in action, starting off accessing Mendeley Data, and then drilling down into these example catalogues and from there finding the example datasets.

By the end of the hack day we had:

Mapped our datasets’ metadata to the FAIR metadata layers of the FAIR Data Point, including W3C’s DCAT spec;
Implemented the proof-of-concept FAIR Data Point-compatible endpoint providing metadata which can be consumed by FAIR-enabled tools;
Demoed the Mendeley Data FAIR Data Point in action, navigating through the layers of FAIR metadata including the data repository (Mendeley Data), catalogue, datasets and data files.

The outcomes of the hack day were: a much better understanding of how to make our datasets available as FAIR resources, so they can be found, integrated and reused by researchers along with other FAIR datasets; and creation of an endpoint which is only a few steps away from being productionised and available to use by the community.

We really enjoyed working closely with Luiz, DTL’s CTO, and developers Rajaram and Kees to concretely and tangibly make progress towards making Mendeley Data datasets more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable!

Follow Mendeley Twitter to hear when we launch this capability!

Mendeley Brainstorm: Open Data – The Wave of the Future?

November 23, 2016November 16, 2016 Christian DeFeo14 Comments

“Pirate Politics” are on the march. The Pirate Party of Iceland tripled their representation in the October election. Many organisations, including the Mozilla Foundation, are clamouring for copyright reform to allow more data sharing. Is Open Data the wave of the future? What are the downsides? We are looking for the most well thought out answer to this question in up to 150 words: use the comment feature below the blog and please feel free to promote your research! The winner will receive an Amazon gift certificate worth £50 and a bag full of Mendeley items; competition closes January 11, 2017.

Pirates on the March

The Pirate Party of Iceland tripled their representation on October 29. Part of their appeal in a country as technology literate as Iceland may be their emphasis on open data and reform of copyright laws to allow the free sharing of information.

A Rebellion?

The Pirates’ success may be part of a wider reaction to the increasing restrictions afforded by copyright. For example, the tractor manufacturer John Deere recently argued in court that its ownership of the software in its vehicles extended beyond the point of their products’ sale. The Mozilla Foundation has also set up a campaign whose aim is to make copyright less stringent.

What Next?

As cultural guru Stewart Brand said, “On the one hand…information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable…on the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Is the future of data open? What are the positives and negatives of a more open paradigm? Tell us!

About Mendeley Brainstorms

Our Brainstorms are challenges so we can engage with you, our users, on the hottest topics in the world of research. We look for the most in-depth and well thought through responses; the best response as judged by the Mendeley team will earn a prize.

References

COYLE, D. (2016). How the digital age cuts through notions of material ownership. The Financial Times. [online] Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d24bd5dc-83c8-11e6-a29c-6e7d9515ad15.html?siteedition=uk#axzz4M10uYtFG [Accessed 3 Oct. 2016].

DE FREYTAS-TAMURA, K. (2016). Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns, After Pirate Party Makes Strong Gains. New York Times. [online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/world/europe/icelands-prime-minister-resigns-after-pirate-party-makes-strong-gains.html?_r=0 [Accessed 2 Nov. 2016].

TURNER, Fred (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2 New Reasons to Love Mendeley on your mobile

November 14, 2016November 21, 2016 Christine

Did you know you can access your Mendeley library on your mobile and tablet? I often ask users, like yourself, this question and more often than not, people are surprised. Once in a while, someone tells me they would love to use our app, but are concerned about using too much storage space. When you try Mendeley for your mobile, you will discover you don’t have to worry about this. You choose what PDFs you keep on your mobile device, and the rest of the library will consist of your metadata only.

We’ve just launched a few exciting new features that make this the perfect time to get the app (if you don’t have it yet!).

Mendeley Profile

You go to conferences to absorb new knowledge, see what is happening in your field, but also to network. Meeting people doing interesting research doesn’t end there, and with your Mendeley Profile you can open the door to meeting more of those people. We’re now making it easier to update vital information on your profile by letting you do it from the mobile apps. It’s always nice to have a face to a name, so take a photo and add it to your Mendeley profile straight from your mobile!

Always improving

We’ve been, and continue to be, very busy in the mobile team. Both the Android and iOS app have seen new features and improvements since being launched. Sometimes these are under the hood, but sometimes they are visual. We’re working on improving our UI and as a consequence, always give you a better experience. If you’ve been using Mendeley on your mobile for a while, you’ll notice we’ve introduced some new colors and an improved navigation menu as well in the last release.

We’re all very proud of these new features and improvements on mobile, but they are just the beginning. We continue to collect feedback and we will continue expanding on these new features and functionalities in upcoming releases. In the mean time, enjoy using Mendeley on your mobile!

Christine is a product manager for mobile, covering iOS and Android apps. She loves all things tech and research, and you can chat with her directly on Twitter @christine_phd

Mendeley Brainstorm – Climate Change – We Have a Winner!

November 8, 2016November 7, 2016 Christian DeFeo1 Comment

Climate change is altering our landscape...potentially forever. — Climate change is altering our landscape…potentially forever.

Many thanks to all those who entered the Mendeley Brainstorm related to Climate Change; picking a winner given all the well thought out answers was not a straightforward matter, however in the end, we selected Vinisha Varghese’s (of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore) response:

The answer is slightly more complex than a simple yes or no. On one hand, the Paris Agreement is celebrated as the documentation of the human race’s first collective effort to combat the biggest threat in our (relatively young) species’ narrative – climate change. On the other hand, this hot-air balloon is constantly shot down as nothing but a mere ‘green-washing’ of white paper. The bottom-line is that the assessed carbon budget is not sufficient to limit warming to 2°C nor does it help the SIDS – who have conveniently been handed a raw deal. While we have put our faith in negative emissions by means of CCS – scalable technology that we are yet to invent, there have been paradigm shifts to more sustainable practices. Personally, I look optimistically at this deal to restrict warming to below 4°C. To sum up, it all depends on our actions in the next 10 years.

We asked her what inspired her. She responded:

I believe what really inspired me to be more vocal is the idea that researchers can influence positive behavioral changes in the masses. We have to make known to the world that there is still hope and that there are ways of reaching that envisioned future if we only act on them. We can no longer sit back and expect our governments and policy-makers to take care of things though – the need of the hour is collective effort. As an optimist and someone closely involved in the environmental field, expressing my opinion on a platform like the Mendeley Brainstorm was a subtle way of giving a ‘nudge’.

Hopefully others will take the hint. Vinisha also told us:

Once again, I would like to express heartfelt thanks for choosing me from amongst so many well-informed experts! It was challenging to keep my opinion within the word limit.This recognition is incentive to keep a researcher like me (so early on in her career) well motivated.

Thank you, Vinisha!

Those who didn’t win this time are encouraged to respond to the latest Mendeley Brainstorm, regarding Hacking and Online Security. Thanks again to all our participants.

Mendeley Blog

Month: November 2016