Month: May 2019

Meet the Team: Karin Hilton, Senior Director Technology

Rachel Brennesholtz

Name: Karin Hilton

Congratulations to Karin for being named one of 50 most influential women in tech in The Netherlands! 

Job title: Senior Director Technology

Karin is responsible for the technology team who are building Mendeley Data, which is Elsevier’s platform to support research data management.  Karin and her team are using technology to transform the way that researchers collaborate and work together to spark discovery and support innovative interdisciplinary thinking.

Before joining Elsevier, Karin was a Technology Director with eBay Classifieds Group heading up core capability technology platforms on a global basis challenging how they respond to mobile wave as an organization and has held technology leadership roles at companies across a range of industries.

When did you join Mendeley?

I joined in June 2018

What do you love most about your job?

I gain energy from making a positive difference – and every time we talk to our customers, I see that the tools and services we are providing are helping them to be more successful. And a successful researcher is a researcher who is changing the world we live in. It’s great to be able to see real change happening as a result of what we build.

What book did you most recently read?

I most recently finished Jodi Taylor’s Hope for the Best.  I usually have 2-3 books on the go at any one point in time – I am also reading Mary Beard’s Women & Power – but aim to always have something lighthearted and relaxing to wind down with at bed time.

What’s one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

That we would love feedback on how to make Mendeley the most effective tool for them. It is really energizing when people reach out and give us feedback on how we can make our product better.

How would you explain your job to a stranger on a bus?

I make tools to help researchers crack their codes

What’s the most exciting part of your job?

The people – definitively the people! We have a team that’s passionate about what we are building, and we work with amazing researchers and thought leaders in our community.

What keeps you awake at night?

I tend to sleep quite soundly – but sometimes I do get woken up by a nocturnal member of my family.  Sometimes it is a Great Dane who has decided to wake me for a midnight stroll and sometimes it is one of the cats proudly presenting their latest ‘gift’ with accompanying commentary on their night hunting prowess.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned this week?

That’s a tough question! I try and keep up with new research in a few fields that interest me: there’s some fascinating new science showing just how far back man has been impacting weather patterns and creating global warming; showing the impact of diet/gut on health and how loss of hippos from riverine areas in Africa is impacting downstream in the health of the ecosystem.

 

 

June 2019 Advisor Briefing Webinar: What’s next for Mendeley

Rachel Brennesholtz

Thanks to everyone who attended our June Advisor Briefing webinar, where we introduced some new features plus had a huge congratulations!

We would like to thank all the Mendeley Advisors for all your dedication to helping promote good research practices around the world.  In the first 6 months of June, Advisors have introduced over 10,000 colleagues to Mendeley and run 171 events in 102 countries around the world!

Topics include:

You can watch the full briefing here.  

 

Supporting researchers with the new Mendeley Reference Manager

sallyransom

Laura ThomsonLaura Thomson, PhD, is Head of Reference Management at Mendeley. She has been with Elsevier since the start of 2015, and brings over 18 years’ experience with information products and research solutions to her role. Praised by her group for her clear vision and creative approach, she plays a key role in shaping how reference management is discussed and driven at Elsevier. With some exciting new developments happening with Mendeley’s reference management solutions, we met with her to find out more.

We recently heard from your colleague Gaby Appleton about the overall vision for Elsevier’s researcher solutions, especially Mendeley. How do Mendeley’s reference management solutions, specifically, fit within that vision?

As Gaby will have told you, the vision for Elsevier is to contribute to improving the information system supporting research. Our aim is to help researchers work even more efficiently so they can spend more time making discoveries.

That’s a statement that truly resonates with me. I started out as a biochemist and, as that career progressed, other tasks started to take over more of my time. In many ways, it stopped being fun because there was less time to do the real research.

The vision for Mendeley is to provide researchers with time-saving tools that help speed up and simplify their workflows. We want to take reference management off researchers’ minds by making all the tasks related to collecting, organizing, reading, annotating and citing as simple as possible – and key to this is the development of the new Mendeley Reference Manager.

With that guiding vision, communication with researchers must be very important to your team’s development plans.

Absolutely. The tools we offer must address challenges in researchers’ daily reality, so we are in constant communication with a range of researchers – those that use Mendeley, those that use other solutions, and those that don’t use any digital software at all to manage their references. These aren’t just casual conversations either. We have a robust user discovery program consisting of weekly sessions in which researchers test what we’re doing and give feedback.

This is an ongoing process, allowing us to provide researchers with a reference manager that not only addresses feedback gathered in the past, but also continues to develop over time with regular releases responding to feedback we continue to receive. Mendeley Reference Manager will evolve as researchers’ needs and the research landscape evolve.

Can you tell us more about the new developments you’re making with Mendeley Reference Manager?MRM image 2

In 2008, Mendeley was launched as a reference manager for researchers. Over the years, we’ve continued to develop Mendeley Desktop and the reference manager products.

More recently, though, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep developing the original Mendeley Desktop in the way we and our users need. A key element of this is how often we release a new version; with Mendeley Desktop we release four to five times a year, but with the new Mendeley Reference Manager we are releasing every two weeks. This means that we can respond faster to user feedback, and get new functionality and fixes out more regularly.

We have also built Mendeley Cite – a new citation add-in for Microsoft® Word. As with Mendeley Reference Manager, we have developed this very much in response to user feedback. For example, users have increasingly been asking for citation support in Microsoft® Office 365 but we could not offer this with the existing Mendeley citation plugin, as it’s built in VBA. We have built the new Mendeley Cite in JavaScript so users can now cite in Office 365.

Can you give us some more details about Mendeley Cite, and any other changes people can expect with the new Mendeley Reference Manager package?

In terms of new functionality that’s already available, two tools I’m really excited about are Mendeley Cite, as mentioned, and Mendeley Notebook – we’re hoping both will really help simplify researchers’ workflows.RNS_963_b.Cite version image

Mendeley Cite enables users to cite references and generate a bibliography, just as they could with our existing citation plugin, but as I mentioned, Mendeley Cite now works with Office 365. You also don’t have to be a Mendeley Desktop user to use Mendeley Cite – it works with your cloud library which is loaded into the add-in, so there is no need to switch between applications when citing, another feature that users were asking for a lot.

Mendeley Notebook is our brand-new note-taking tool. It’s a working space for keeping thoughts in one place, making it quick and easy to collect highlights from multiple PDFs and add you own comments. Researchers told us that they liked having highlights and annotations associated with the PDF, but that they were usually reading multiple PDFs at once and wanted their notes from all of these in one place. With Notebook they can do this.

We’ve also made the reference management experience generally more accessible and streamlined by making a lot of things just that bit better. A user’s library now automatically syncs to the cloud when they’re signed in; notifications about whether an action was successfully completed are a lot clearer; the look and feel has also been updated… And we’re continuing work on more features and functionality, which will release throughout 2019 – watch this space!

Gaby also talked about Elsevier’s commitment to source neutrality and maintenance of user control. How does the new Mendeley Reference Manager align with that?

Mendeley Reference Manager remains a place where researchers can gather papers and documents from any publisher or source. We do not give priority to Elsevier content; there’s no change there. Research support solutions of this type must remain source neutral. It’s essential for the researcher to remain unrestricted in that.

How do you feel now that the new version is out in the world?

I’m naturally excited to see the response to the new Mendeley Reference Manager. The development vision was very much informed by conversations with researchers about daily challenges. The post-release feedback on the new version is a key part of our development vision because it feeds our continuous iterative development. So, I’m excited and I know the development team are too.

And, lastly, where can people go to see all this for themselves?

The new Mendeley Reference Manager can be downloaded from www.mendeley.com/reference-management/reference-manager-beta. It’s currently in BETA, and doesn’t have all the functionality of the existing Mendeley Desktop just yet – but, as mentioned, we’ll be making releases to it every two weeks. The BETA works alongside Mendeley Desktop so you can try it out whilst still using your existing Desktop – just sign in using your Mendeley credentials and your library will sync.

You can get Mendeley Cite from Microsoft AppSource at www.mendeley.com/cite/word/install.

We’d love to get feedback on both of these to help inform future developments. So I encourage everyone to let us know their thoughts using the feedback links within Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite. We really hope everyone enjoys using them!

Thank you very much for your time.

You can find out more about all-things Mendeley here

Advisor of the Month: Gustavo Bernardi Pereira, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil

Rachel Brennesholtz

How did you get into your field and what is your research story?

Since my childhood, I have been passionate about learning how things work as well as any quirky stuff I can find. Because of this “quirky stuff” side, I ended up starting a bachelor in physics and maths. However, something was missing… the “how things work” side. So, I decided to change my degree to Industrial Engineering at Federal University of Parana.

In the meantime, I got a scholarship to study MEng. Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Warwick. Back to the quirky stuff… my project was called “Manufacture of functional polymer-composite materials for electromagnetic applications by extrusion”. Even though it was a challenging project, my supervisor at the time suggested I use a reference manager called “Mendeley”. As most of the students, I did not pay enough attention to her and made it without using it.

Back in Brazil I began a Masters in Process Mining. As soon as I started studying it, I realized that working only on the research itself would consume much more energy than I expected (as you often have to redo your work). At this point I decided to optimize my research process. And I decided to follow my former supervisor’s advice and start using Mendeley.

Where do you do your research/work the best? What kind of environment suits you?

Usually I like to balance two environments: loud and talkative (to generate the ideas) and quiet and surrounded by nature (to organise the ideas).

How long have you been on Mendeley? 

I first heard about it in 2013. However, it was only in 2016 I started exploring its features and using them effectively.

What were you using prior to Mendeley and how does Mendeley influence your research?

I used to have a notepad file with a list of references, which I pasted in to the document at the end. When I found out what Mendeley could do for my research, I must confess I was bit sceptical in the beginning. As I started using it, the intuitive environment changed my mind and now I am very comfortable about swapping my notepad to Mendeley.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor and how are you involved with the program?

Seeing my Master’s peers struggling to finish a 6 page assignment because of the references brought my attention to simple problems around me. So I became an Advisor and since then I have been holding teaching sessions for many groups in the university.

Which researcher would you like to work with or meet, dead or alive?

Leonardo da Vinci is one researcher I would like to meet and work with. Possibly because of his broad range of skills in different areas.

What book are you reading at the moment and why?

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The book talks about how decisions you assume are being made rationally sometimes are not really something you have a choice about.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned this week?

Well… some people say it is possible to use a biological virus to improve computing power hahaha https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.8b01508

What is the best part about working in research?

Having your research used by someone else (to help someone, not to have citations) is the best part.

And the worst/most challenging part about working in research?

Dealing with egos, in my humble opinion, is the biggest challenge we have been facing in science as it jeopardises both the speed and the environment in which the research is made.

What is the one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

Unless your notepad file still can solve your problems, use Mendeley…. for the greater good.

 

Follow Gustavo on Mendeley

Find out more about the Mendeley Advisor Community

Find out more about all-things Mendeley

Meet the team: Wouter Haak

sallyransom

Name: Wouter Haak
Job title: VP Research Data Management

Wouter HaakWouter is responsible for research data management at Elsevier, specifically the Mendeley Data platform. This is an open ecosystem of researcher data tools: a data repository, an electronic lab notebook, a data search tool, and a data project management tool. Aside from his work for Elsevier, Wouter is part of several open data community initiatives; for example he co-chairs the RDA-WDS Scholix working group on data-article linking; he is part of the JISC Data2paper advisory board; and his group participates in the NIH Data Commons pilot project. It is all about the ‘R’ of FAIRdata: focusing on data re-use.

Prior to Elsevier, Wouter worked in online product and strategy roles. He has worked at eBay Classifieds, e.g. Marktplaats.nl, Kijiji.it – in roles varying from business development to overall responsibility for the classified’s businesses in Italy, France, Belgium and Turkey. Furthermore, he has worked for the Boston Consulting Group.

When did you join Mendeley?

2016

What do you love most about your job?

I love speaking to researchers, about their projects and visions. Going to universities and learning about the things they do, I’m proud that I can contribute a tiny piece to this amazing world.

What book did you most recently read?

I read the Cicero trilogy by Robert Harris. Amazing how something that takes place during the Roman empire is still actual today. The main character is not Cicero but his slave: Tiro. Tiro – quietly working in the background – is actually the hero of this story.

What’s the one thing you want people to know about Mendeley?

That Mendeley is becoming more than a reference manager. I would like to see Mendeley grow to becoming a daily virtual partner of researchers.

How would you explain your job to a stranger on a bus?

I help researchers and universities with re-using the data and measurements that they create better.

What’s the most exciting part of your job?

In my direct team of about 50 people, I find it exciting that we have more than 10 nationalities. I have lost count and that is fun.

What keeps you awake at night?

Nothing keeps me awake at night. Having gone through raising young kids, I have learned that problems are best tackled during the day.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned this week?

I learned that the European Open Science Cloud project is starting to have areas that are going to be very real and helpful for research overall. My plan is to see if we can contribute to this. Less so to the infrastructure but more likely on the ‘tools’ or ‘commons’ side.

Find out more about Mendeley Data

Find out more about all-things Mendeley

Effective research data management with Mendeley Data

sallyransom

The science of tomorrow will require the data from today

All the information underpinning research articles offers value to other researchers: raw and processed data, protocols and methods, machine and environment settings, and scripts and algorithms. Sharing and using such research data can increase the impact, validity, reproducibility, efficiency, and transparency of research.

To unlock the true potential of research data, the Mendeley Data team believe that there is a need to move beyond solely making data available and find a dependable solution that enables data to be stored, shared and re-used. So we launched Mendeley Data. When collaborating with the research community to develop Mendeley Data, we followed four guiding data principles:

  1. Data needs to be discoverable
  2. Data needs to be comprehensible
  3. Researchers should be able to take ownership of their data
  4. Research data management (RDM) solutions need to be interoperable.

Discover more about the four principles for unlocking the full potential of research data.

Empowering researchers to perform research data management

Open science benefits research and society, and drives research performance. Here are five things you need to know about RDM with Mendeley Data:

  1. Mendeley Data supports the entire lifecycle of research data: modules are specifically designed to utilize data to its fullest potential, simplifying and enhancing current ways of working
  2. Researchers own and control their data: you can choose to keep data private, or publish it under one of 16 open data licenses
  3. Mendeley Data is an open system: modules are designed to be used together, as standalones, or combined with other RDM solutions
  4. Mendeley Data can increase the exposure and impact of research: Mendeley Data Search indexes over 10 million datasets from more than 35 repositories
  5. We actively participate in the open data community: we are currently working on more than 20 projects globally

View an infographic on the five facts

Mendeley Data 5 facts

Striving for superior data management for researchers

No one can solve RDM challenges alone, nor can one business unleash the full potential of research data sharing. However, through following core data principles, and continually evaluating and improving the RDM solutions built on our Mendeley Data platform, we hope to be able to contribute to supporting researchers discover the value of their data .

Get started with Mendeley Data.

Find out more about all-things Mendeley here. 

Mendeley’s vision for supporting researchers

sallyransom

Gaby-Appleton-at-MendeleyGaby Appleton is the Managing Director for Mendeley and Researcher Products at Elsevier. She leads an expert product management team in a mission to support millions of researchers with better digital information systems. The aim is to help them have more impact with their work and effectively demonstrate that impact, to stay up to date, to organize and share their knowledge, and to advance their career. She brings over 15 years’ experience to her role along with a passion for the world of research. We met with her to discuss the development vision for Mendeley.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss the development vision for Mendeley. How would you define that vision?

Our vision for Mendeley and indeed for all the Elsevier solutions is to contribute to improving the information system that supports research — an ecosystem of tools and data that addresses real challenges in researchers’ daily reality.

What informs that vision?

Above all, it’s informed by conversations with researchers, which is something I spend a lot of time on. Not that it is a hardship! Spending time with them is truly one of the highlights of my job. Hearing about ground-breaking research from people who are so enthusiastic about what they’re doing is inspirational.

But it’s also essential. The Mendeley team that is responsible for defining our vision needs that open, honest contact with researchers.

Why are those conversations so important?

Because our development strategy has to focus on the problems we can solve for users. If we were doing something because it was exciting technologically but it didn’t address real challenges, then we’d be completely missing the point. We need to ground our development in researchers’ needs.

That’s why we start by listening to gain insight into their challenges, then look at what the technology can do, and finally design solutions to those challenges.

What is the vision for Mendeley’s development that has come out of conversations with researchers?

Based on all the challenges researchers have talked about, we’ve adopted four principles to guide our development strategy: source neutrality, interoperability, transparency, and user control.

Source neutrality means that researchers can use this information system to retrieve, store and disseminate information regardless of the publisher. An unbiased view is the essence of good research and we want to ensure that our platforms and tools are open to content beyond Elsevier’s. Mendeley users can receive recommendations on what to read next (Mendeley Suggest) based on what they’ve already added to their library, and funders-imagethese recommendations are not limited to Elsevier – they can be from any publisher. And we don’t restrict that to papers. Researchers have talked about challenges with staying abreast of funding opportunities, so we’ve worked to provide one of the largest aggregations of funding information, maintaining source neutrality and transparency. The same applies to career postings.

Interoperability is about ensuring that applications, tools and data sets from different providers can work together. The Mendeley API represents our commitment to interoperability with any tools that researchers need.

Transparency is vital to researchers. If they receive an alert or recommendation, they need to know what prompted it. Otherwise, they can’t know if it’s relevant without spending time assessing it. If they are looking at search results, it’s great if they can see how their search string relates to those results. That helps with filtering and refining the hit set. An example of how we maintain transparency is in the functioning of Mendeley Suggest. It makes recommendations for further reading based on what a user and their colleagues are reading, but crucially, it includes information about why that article is relevant.

Control is all about giving researchers control of their own data, where it’s shared and how it’s used by the system. If they don’t want their data to be visible beyond a select group of users, or they don’t want their behavior to provoke recommendations, they should be able to opt out of those features. User control is all about making it easy for an individual to find the settings for preferences. A good example in our system is Mendeley Data, which makes it easy for users to define exactly who sees their data. Similarly, the organization, privacy and recommendation settings of researchers’ reference manager library are easy to control. What displays in a Mendeley Profile is entirely at the user’s discretion.

That’s where our development team constantly strives to take Mendeley: to keep it open to content from any source; to make sure its application programming interface is compatible with multiple tools and platforms; to give users insight into how its features make recommendations; and to ensure that it’s easy for users to set their preferences.

You’re currently developing a new reference manager, now available in BETA, which is a completely re-platformed and updated version of Mendeley’s core reference management function. How does it align with this vision for Mendeley?

I’ll leave it to my colleague Laura Thomson, our Head of Reference Management, to talk about the new Mendeley Reference Manager in more detail in her upcoming interview. Briefly, reference management tools are what we’re best known for. Mendeley Desktop is now ten years old and, while it’s developed incrementally over that time, to really act on users’ feedback and make some big improvements, we felt we needed to take a new RNS_963_a.General version image (2)approach and take advantage of new technologies that have become available since the original Mendeley Desktop was built.

The new Mendeley Reference Manager remains free-to-use and publisher agnostic. The Mendeley API remains open, allowing researchers and developers to create interoperability with multiple tools. We’ve ensured that the settings for the library, recommendations and so on are transparent and in researchers’ control. It’s unique in satisfying those four aspects of the vision for an information system supporting research.

Every aspect of Mendeley follows the same principles and is informed by real-world conversations: from reference management through data sharing to showcasing impact.

We would never pretend that we have all the answers, but we listen. We’ll continue to communicate with researchers as we work on each application of Mendeley. Our goal at Elsevier is an information system that supports research, and Mendeley aims to remain a core part of that.

Thank you very much for your time.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Find out more about all-things Mendeley here

Find out more about the information system supporting research here