Collaboration is Key to Making the Most of Big Data

May 22, 2014 Alice Bonasio1 Comment

On May 13th Mendeley Co-founder Jan Reichelt took part in a really exciting event hosted by the Big Data Institute, which was born out of a partnership between Reed Elsevier and UCL last year. For a whole day, major players from across business, education and academia got together to discuss what the big idea is with big data and education.

Olivier Dumon, MD of Academic and Government Markets at Elsevier, kicked things off by talking about their transition from print publishing to digital analytics, and how the acquisition of Mendeley and the partnership with UCL tie into Reed Elsevier’s future strategy for innovation.

“Eventually data will surpass crude oil in importance,” said Claude Kirchner from Inria (a public research body dedicated to digital science and technology), talking about the rising popularity of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the widespread benefits that can be achieved by gathering insights from big data into the process of learning itself.

It was clear that big data was high on the government’s agenda too, on a national as well as an European level. Malcolm Scott, Deputy Director, Data Strategy and Creative Industries, represented the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which recently announced £73 million of new funding to help unlock the potential of big data), and Androulla Vassillou, the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth sent a video message saying it was important that Europe was at the forefront of developments around big data.

The Vice Provost of UCL, David Price stressed the importance of big data as a research and collaboration tool, but he certainly wasn’t the only one to pick up on that theme, as collaboration and communication echoed everywhere as the key words of the day:

The problem, says Xavier Prats Monne, Deputy DG for Education at European Commission, is that educators, businesses and ministries do not communicate with one another naturally. “It is the duty of EC to facilitate communication.” What is needed, according to Elizabeth Crossick, Head of Government Affairs at Reed Elsevier, is a collaborative rather than combative approach. “This is an area of constant change – progress will not be made unless we collaborate.” John Higgins, Director General of DIGITALEUROPE, heartily agreed: “There needs to be collaboration across borders, bringing all parties to the conversation,” he said.

Gabriel Hughes (who’s Xoogler and honorary Mendeleyan as well as VP Analytics as Elsevier) then delivered an inspiring presentation about the skills we need to harness in order to take advantage of big data properly and leverage it to make researchers more productive: “There needs to be interaction between skill sets – between data scientists with knowledge of processing and analysis. The ability to collaborate and communicate with others to solve problems is essential.”

“Remember that big data is community based,” said Daniel Hulme from Satalia, a company that works on algorithmic solutions. “we must build groups to solve problems and use platforms to gather data and use that to innovate.” Jan Muehlfeit, Chairman Europe at Microsoft, agreed that with education becoming global and students collaborating with others across borders, teamwork is absolutely vital. “There needs to be continual feedback from the users of Big Data to improve its potential.”

Jan Reichelt said that encouraging collaboration and productivity was key to Mendeley’s success, and that the platform thrived by socializing big data to give it context and create a better user experience. “Companies should use big data to offer a personalized service that is above the norm, to give users what they want. We drive a social discovery engine, and if you aggregate this activity in the cloud, you can derive tremendous insights, adding a new layer to how we look at science.” He talked about the possibilities, some of which Mendeley already offers, to track how people are interacting with your research, and measuring impact in real time rather than waiting two years for citations to trickle through. On a wider question, he reflected on the positive feedback that Mendeley gets from the community about how it makes research more fun (or at least less painful!) and he asks “Why can’t we make research, which was really tedious and boring, why can’t we make it fun? Why can’t we make school, education fun?” Why not indeed.

What do you think? Does big data affect your work and research? Will it mean something different in the future? Join the big conversation!

Infographics by Scriberia

The Big Idea Behind Big Data

May 6, 2014 Alice Bonasio

Next Tuesday the 13^th May, Mendeley and Elsevier will be joining a day of lively debating around Big Data and education. Some of the key questions to be tackled include how we can use big data to transform the way we deliver education and enhance learning, what are the possibilities and limitations around big data, and how can those involved in education make the most of this digital revolution.

The title of the conference asks, “What’s The Big Idea” behind big data, and Mendeley Co-founder Jan Reichelt will join Elsevier’s Olivier Dumon (MD Research Markets) and Gabriel Hughes, VP of Web Analytics to try and come up with some answers (or maybe even more interesting questions!). The keynotes and panels will bring together perspectives from industry, government, institutions, educators and students to determine how we can foster more successful initiatives to benefit the entire academic community.

This is one of a series of policy events organised by the European Commission and DIGITALEUROPE under the umbrella of TECY (Technology, Education, Culture, Youth), and was brought about by the recent partnership between UCL and Elsevier which created the UCL Big Data Institute. This collaboration, which was launched in December 2013, is looking to explore innovative ways to serve researcher’s needs through new technologies and applied analytics.

Interestingly, another key theme of the conference is also where academia can partner up with industry to develop, mine and analyse meaningful data sources to deliver radically improved learning experiences, and what Europe can do to stay at the forefront of this worldwide revolution. That’s something that Mendeley has some experience of, as we’ve been working with the European Commission on many projects like CODE to improve the service we offer our community. We also collaborate with other academic institutions and industry partners such as the University of Passau in Germany, who have recently launched the groundbreaking 42-Data portal.

We’ll be posting updates on the discussions throughout the day using the hashtags #Mendeley #UCLTECY and #bdw14 and there will be videos and notes published afterwards, so watch this space. In the meantime, as usual, if you have any questions or comments just leave them below or get in touch via Twitter of Facebook!

Research4Life working with Mendeley’s Reference Management and Collaboration Platform

May 1, 2014 Alice Bonasio

We’re really happy to share the news that from now on Mendeley will be actively supporting the Research4Life partnership and helping to disseminate cutting-edge scientific information to researchers in over 100 developing countries.

Research4Life is a public-private partnership that’s aiming to help the achievement of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by reducing the huge knowledge gap that exists between industrialised and developing countries. It brings together institutions from across government, academia and industry such as (to name but a few) the World Health Organization, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, the Food and Agriculture Organization, Microsoft, the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell and Yale Universities, and approximately 200 publishers, who provide accessible scholarly content to over 7000 institutions worldwide.

It’s one of the many initiatives already supported by Elsevier that helps researchers get access to the information they need in places where resources are often scarce or problematic to get to. There are currently over 40,000 peer-reviewed resources made available to them through Research4Life, and as a founding partner, Elsevier contributed a quarter of those through Scopus and Science Direct, including about 3,000 journals and 12,000 books.

These resources are really crucial in enabling researchers to carry out their work in developing countries, and in 2013 there were over 3 million article downloads from Science Direct alone. Since Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier last year, we’ve been excited about the possibility of getting involved in such projects, as they tie into Mendeley’s original vision of making science more open and broadening access to scientific content where it can make a real difference to people’s lives.

Since first launching in 2001, the program has expanded to 4 targeted areas, supporting crucial research into Health (HINARI), Agriculture (AGORA), the Environment (OARE) and Development and Innovation (ARDI), and Elsevier has committed to providing the programme with free or low-cost access to this content until at least 2020. In addition, they also provide strategic, technical and communication expertise that helps advance Research4Life. For example, the Elsevier Foundation’s Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries Program gives grants for programs that build the infrastructure, improve information literacy, and provide training to further the use of Research4Life content.

And that’s where Mendeley comes in, because we’re providing all those researchers with a cloud-based, open and easily accessible tool to not only manage all those resources, but also to communicate and share insights and valuable information with other scientists all over the world. Mendeley already has over 160,000 users in Research4Life countries, and more than 100 of our advisors help to train, educate, and increase awareness about how researchers can use Mendeley to facilitate and advance their work. A big part of Mendeley’s involvement in the project will be to celebrate and promote those stories of success and collaboration to the wider Mendeley community and connect researchers who might be working on the same problems in different parts of the world.

“So far researchers on the program have been using patchy solutions involving various workflow and citation management tools, but these are often expensive, and if you’re trying to collaborate on a joint project with a researcher who does not have the same tool, that can be really problematic,” says Jan Reichelt, Co-founder and President of Mendeley. “So we’re hoping that Mendeley, with its vast community of over 3 million researchers worldwide, will help to really facilitate and accelerate the pace of discovery for Research4Life Scientists.”

Are you a researcher benefitting from the Research4Life program? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this and other similar initiatives. Get in touch by leaving a comment below or join the Mendeley Research4Life group!

Happy Anniversary!

April 9, 2014 Alice Bonasio2 Comments

Dear Mendeley Community,

Wow, it’s now already one year after Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier, and as it’s probably common, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect on the past 12 months, and tell you a little bit about the insights and how I think about Mendeley and Elsevier one year into the acquisition and what we’ve achieved so far.

The main reason why Elsevier and Mendeley came together was that the teams on both sides wanted to build something much bigger and much more useful for researchers and scientists, the end-users of digital products and digital content. In essence, how I like to describe it, the acquisition of Mendeley by Elsevier was “Mendeley’s biggest funding round ever”. Not only would working with Elsevier give us access to resources ($$$), but also to assets (digital products and great content) and knowledge (incl. publishing and customer relationships). Our joint vision is aligned around building a “global research collaboration platform”, with a very researcher-centric view. We felt and saw a serious commitment from the teams to work on a plan how this could realistically be implemented, given both companies’ quite different backgrounds, and using both companies’ resources, assets, and know-how. And as every start-up founder knows, “complementarity of the team”, assuming we can get alignment around the same strategy and we see commitment from everyone involved, is really what you are looking for…

Coming back to our joint plans and commitment from both Elsevier and Mendeley, in 2013 alone we hired about 15 more people, and this year we will hire at least another 20 staff. This allowed us to bring out a new Mendeley iOS version (and we’ve recently started to build our Android team – it’s one of the most requested features on http://feedback.mendeley.com, so yes – we continue to listen!), to continuously iterate on new Mendeley Desktop versions (with cutting-edge features), and also to support the Open Source CSL Project. We’ve also started work on a new web library, will improve our institutional offering MIE (Mendeley Institutional Edition, which institutions like MIT have adopted), and are currently completely revamping our APIs including the open API for third-party developers, with Mendeley Desktop also moving to these new APIs. Of course, on the back-end, the Mendeley engineering teams are also busy ramping up Mendeley’s scalability and security, to keep up with our growth! We integrated with existing Elsevier products, such as ScienceDirect and Scopus, which let millions of researchers use these products jointly much more efficiently (a seemingly small feature, but if you look at usage and how much time we save people, it’s quite impressive!), and Scopus has integrated Mendeley readership statistics, bringing more visibility to “alternative impact metrics”, or “altmetrics”, a movement which Mendeley helped to kickstart after all. … Wow! Quite a long list!

But we don’t stop there – Mendeley has also continued to support all kinds of open science efforts publicly, and just generally we continue to try to make positive contributions, and foster a challenging, high-tech, and vibrant company culture (with some pretty cool stuff coming out of our monthly hack days!), something that Elsevier was really interested in learning about and is actively trying to absorb. We push for openness, engage with our users and Advisors as much as before, and in many ways remain a leader in different types of discussions in the academic community. Our joint teams have also participated in and positively influenced company-internal policy discussions, around what a publisher like Elsevier should allow regarding academic social networking sites, etc. And right after the acquisition, we’ve increased the storage limits, and through the Elsevier sales team we’ve brought much more free Mendeley to many more end-users than we could have done on our own – and yes, Mendeley’s freemium model will remain.

The thing that keeps us going, most of all, is the feedback we get from our users, saying that Mendeley actually made a positive difference to their work and to their lives. And while I still think that Greg Laden calling Mendeley “the most fun you can have with your pants on” is hard to beat, here are a few more recent ones:

“I am quite passionate about Mendeley, specifically because of how much it helped me within my own research as I completed my MLIS degree as well as my MA in history (especially while working on my thesis). I just recently started working as a full-time librarian. The library I work in uses and promotes EndNote extensively. I have recently made suggestions to the organization that it could be a good idea to start promoting Mendeley as an alternative to EndNote and they seemed a bit hesitant to move forward. I am hoping that if I am able to become a Mendeley Advisor, it will inspire the rest of the staff to get on board with promoting Mendeley.” Katherine, Librarian at Texas A&M University
“Before Mendeley I took approximately 10x more time to prepare a research article. And again if the article was not suitable for submitted journal–then again I’d have to arrange all the references with a different citation format. Sometime it took more than a week. But after Mendeley, I can do all this work within minutes. I am really so happy with this software. I recommended this software to my [post-graduate] students and staff members. They are learning this software under my guidance.” Samir, Assistant Professor at Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University, India
“I manage academic technologies for the university, teach Sociology, and am a grad student as well. I enjoy finding new technologies and teaching faculty and students how to use them to advance their academic careers. I enjoy Mendeley as it is a great tool that also allows for social collaboration.” Aaron, Graduate Student, Southern New Hampshire University

It’s of course not all sunshine and ice cream (especially not in London…). Some of the things that have consumed our energy without much visible impact are the more corporate structures that have come our way, for example “back-office integration”; or more meetings with and sign-offs by more people (Elsevier is very consensus-driven); or more systems and processes with more approval layers, which has slowed us down, etc. But I can proudly say that the Mendeley team, with support from within Elsevier (!), has so far bravely fought the start-up fight against corporate structures, and we’re still running on Google Apps for Business. All-in-all we’re actually doing pretty well (see above) and have a great team spirit between the teams, considering what many times happens when a big company buys a small company. It’s maybe also just being part of “Mendeley growing up”.

So what’s ahead? The Elsevier/Mendeley team is now building a complete and highly engaging collaboration platform for researchers and scientists. Researcher-centricity has always been at the heart of what Mendeley stood for. And Elsevier has filled crucial “blind spots” in the product portfolio – we can now bring value to scientists along the whole workflow, from excellent high-quality content, to search and (social) discovery, evaluation, reading, storing, sharing, and annotating articles, submitting manuscripts, and networking with colleagues. By pulling together the different products and assets, we can leverage more data to deliver and drive more and better content (incl. third-party publisher content – Mendeley has always been publisher-neutral) to the right users, increase researcher productivity, and make it an awesome experience! The next steps on this journey are further product integration between Elsevier and Mendeley, working with additional publishers, and bringing Mendeley to more institutions around the world.

Concluding, I’m still impressed by the user love we get weekly, if not daily, from our team, our Advisors, and our users who I ask to continue to support us, challenge us, and to keep us on our toes, as that gives us as the Elsevier/Mendeley team leverage within the wider context of the much bigger company we’re part of now. Mendeley is a great company to work for and it’s a great team deserving this support. I really believe that all our efforts, before but also now jointly to some extend with Elsevier, have made science more open, collaborative, and accessible, in addition to making our users just simply more productive. I’m proud of everyone who has helped to create Mendeley, who has built bridges between Elsevier and Mendeley, who has helped us and challenged us on this journey – the academic world without Mendeley would certainly look different.

Thank you

Jan

PS: If you are interested in more background information, I’ve participated in a podcast a few weeks back about “Life after the acquisition” – you can listen here for more and BBC Radio 4 also broadcast a very interesting documentary today where I explain some of those points in more detail.

Scopus Now Features Mendeley Readership Stats!

March 14, 2014 Alice Bonasio

A new feature on Scopus now shows users what the Mendeley readership statistics are for a specific article. The beta version has just gone live last week, and now it’s possible not only to see how many times a paper has been downloaded to a user’s Mendeley library, but also to view a handy breakdown by demographics such as what discipline those researchers belong to, what their academic status is, and their country of origin.

These stats will automatically show up on the Scopus Documents Details pages if at least one Mendeley user has saved the document to their library, together with a link back to the record on Mendeley (if not, then nothing will show up for that document, similar to the way that the Scopus Altmetric.com widget works).

Since 2012, Scopus has shown altmetric.com information, but the added Mendeley demographic breakdown adds another layer to that, giving a much more comprehensive view of an article’s impact, available instantly at a glance. This means that when trawling through hundreds of abstracts (something that as a PhD student I have to do on a regular basis, so I feel your pain) you can quickly gauge which papers might be most relevant by seeing how many colleagues in your discipline have the document in their Mendeley library.

As well as saving you time, the feature enhances citation metrics because Mendeley readership demonstrates alternative types of academic influence. Research has shown some evidence supporting the fact that Mendeley readership counts correlate to some extent with future citations. On the other hand, the most read article on Mendeley, “How to choose a good scientific problem” (Alon, 2009), with nearly 55 thousand Mendeley readers, only has 5 citations on Scopus. It’s therefore not too unreasonable to think that you’d be in a much better position to make an informed decision about that paper’s impact if given both types of readership stats rather than just the one!

More details are available on the Scopus Blog and you can also email the Scopus team with your feedback!

Export directly from Scopus and Science Direct!

February 3, 2014 Alice Bonasio10 Comments

You know that nice feeling you get when things just work? Well, here at Mendeley we love coming up with ways to make that happen for researchers everywhere, and building features that save them time is usually a good way to go about it.

As a PhD student myself, I know that one of the biggest time drains when doing your research can be the process of finding, processing and organizing your relevant citations and papers. Having to download each one individually before adding them to Mendeley was a big frustration when doing my literature review, and many academics in our community shared similar experiences.

That’s why the Mendeley team put a lot of work in building an improved Web Importer that was released last June and then integrating it with Science Direct and Scopus (as well as most other sites!) to make the process of putting those papers and references in your Mendeley library as smooth and painless as possible, just as it should be.

To give Mendeley users even more options though, we’ve also worked with Elsevier to build the “Export to Mendeley” functionalities right into the Scopus and Science Direct platforms, which means that you don’t even have to install the web importer to send articles and citations to Mendeley, and you can also choose which folder in your library they should go into.

The fact that this is all done without you having to navigate away from your search results or article pages will hopefully speed up the research workflow for our users, and help them spend more time reading and writing papers rather than wrestling with them. Please let us know how this new feature works for you, and leave any suggestions in the comments below!

Mendeley Supports the Open Source CSL Project

January 29, 2014 Alice Bonasio2 Comments

As a Mendeley user, you might already be familiar with the Citation Style Language (CSL).

This open source project, created by Bruce D’Arcus from Miami University, and run by a small team of volunteers, has become quite popular in recent years. CSL is currently used by over 20 software products, and there are over 6750 freely available citation styles for thousands of scientific journals. And CSL has a long history at Mendeley: since our first release in 2008, Mendeley has been using CSL styles to format citations and bibliographies (from 2010 onward, we also have been using the open source citeproc-js CSL processor by Frank Bennett of Nagoya University).

Over the last few years, Mendeley has moved away from simply using CSL and become one of its biggest contributors. Our very own Magnificent Code Matador, Carles Pina, collaborates with Sebastian Karcher and Rintze Zelle at the CSL project to improve the central CSL style repository, and he helped create CSL styles for 1500 Elsevier journals. We also collaborated with Columbia University Libraries to create the Visual CSL Editor, which was funded by a Sloan Foundation Award and released in 2012.

Now we’re increasing our support by, together with Elsevier, making the first major financial contribution to the CSL project. We have made a $5000 donation, and we hope this helps ensure the long-term sustainability of this valuable project.

Sebastian Karcher and Rintze Zelle commented that Mendeley is one of the most popular products to use CSL, and that this level of involvement is crucial in helping them move CSL forward. They hope others will follow Mendeley’s lead, and look forward to continue improving CSL, with better support for multilingual citations, legal citations, and archival sources. The CSL project also continues to reach out to publishers to further increase the number of journals covered by CSL styles.

Here at Mendeley we’re really proud to support an initiative that helps the academic community with their research. We would also like to hear your experiences of using CSL and what improvements you’d like to see implemented. As usual, feel free to get in touch with Mendeley via the feedback forum, or leave a comment here.

Technology and Research Mendeley Masterclass

October 10, 2013 Alice Bonasio

©Tom Atkinson 2013 - www.r3digital.co.uk — ©Tom Atkinson 2013

Last month we saw another edition of the global extravaganza that is Social Media Week. This time around there were over 1000 events and 25,000 attendees in 8 cities around the globe. The theme for this year was “Open & Connected” which is pretty much a perfect fit for the Mendeley philosophy. So we thought it would be great to host an event in the London SMW Hub about how technology is changing the way we conduct and fund research, how researchers interact, discover content and share their findings, as well as how the non-academic public can get involved and make a real different through citizen science initiatives.

Our Masterclass was streamed live and proved to be one of the most popular events of the week, with hundreds of people tuning in and sending their own questions.

Mendeley Co-founder and President Jan Reichelt kicked off the series of lightning presentations by explaining how Mendeley can help researchers organise their papers, but also how it went far beyond that. “Research is an inherently social activity, and Mendeley is an environment starting with productivity going over into collaboration, and that also crucially captures the social context going on around that research.”

Rachel Greene from JoVE challenged researchers to “stop reading and start watching,” explaining how the majority of the time scientists failed to accurately replicate the findings of key studies. She believes that technologies such as the one used in their peer-reviewed Journal of Visualized Experiments are much more suited for that purpose than traditional print, and can therefore dramatically increase reproducibility and the pace of scientific discovery.

“In the past everything was recorded on paper, but current science is very digital,” says IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg from Elsevier’s Article of the Future project, which aims to improve scientific communication in all its rich facets. “All the records are digital, all the capturing of scientific data is digital, and the communication of that information of course is also digital. However the traditional publishers have not yet adapted to that, what they usually do is flatten the multidimensional, rich research that an author has created into a two-dimensional paper of text and images.” He gave insight into some tantalizing possibilities, including the ability to run variations of some experiments – in computer science for example – within the parameters of the article itself, making it a living, evolving piece of collaborative research.

Nicolai Humphreys from The Lancet told of how the meaning of the journal’s name came from the fact that “A lancet can be an arched window to let light in and can also be a sharp surgical instrument to cut out the dross” and upon founding the journal in 1823 Thomas Wakley stated his intention that the publication should serve both those functions. Fast-forward nearly 200 years and Nicolai is part of the team that is using technology to cut out the dross and make academic publishing more dynamic and cutting edge.

Emma Cooper described the journey that took their digital amusements company Team Cooper to developing a Facebook game in conjunction with The Sainsbury Laboratory to help harness the brainpower of citizen scientists to tackle Ash Dieback disease. Quoting Dr Dan MacLean, who approached them about building the game with their data, “humans are smart and humorous, and we love games.” The key to the success of Fraxinus is the human ability to recognise patterns, and this proved really addictive with players (over 38,000 in the first month), who spend 20 minutes on average playing the game, where the average tends to be around 5-10 minutes.

That is what Robert Simpson from citizen science web portal Zooniverse calls “cognitive surplus,” which describes the vast amount of time that we collectively spend on activities such as watching TV. “The human race spends 16 years every hour playing Angry Birds every hour. There’s a lot of brainpower out there and what we try to do is take that brainpower and make it more useful to researchers.” The team at Zooniverse works with researchers to design sites that take their data and presents it into a format that will let the crowd help them to achieve their objectives. In the case of Snapshot Serengeti, for example, this meant classifying the millions of pictures taken over 2 years by camera traps in Tanzania to provide new insight into wildlife dynamics.

“These days with modern technology Citizen Science is becoming a fresh new hot subject in science,” says Margaret Gold of Citizen Cyberlab, which is leveraging the web, mobile phones and other tools and platforms to enable crowd-sourced scientific research. “We give people across the globe an interactive means to either help with the collection of data or the processing of data, pattern recognition and so forth, and all this makes a very genuine contribution towards science.”

Dr Rayna Stamboliyska, a Research Fellow and Digital Content Coordinator at the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris, believes that technology can be used to bring research into primary schools, and that “we can change the world many kids at a time.” In these programs, PhD fellows work with school children to develop research projects, leveraging and incorporating various technologies and social media. “This not only engages them in the STEM curricula at a young age, but it’s a really gender neutral policy, so we’re addressing the problem of having so few women in science.”

But ground-breaking research often comes across the stumbling block that is lack of funding, and this is where Liz Wald from Indiegogo believes that crowdfunding can help scientists. “it’s really about getting rid of gatekeepers, knocking down barriers and taking ideas right to the crowd,” she said as she went through a few of the projects that were crowdfunded through Indiegogo, such as Kite Patch (a patch that lets people avoid mosquito bites) and uBiome (where you sent off swabs of your bacteria to them so that they could let you know more about yourself and also help the wider project to sequence the Microbiome). The message was that people will not only fund cool and useful gadgets, but all forms of science as long as you tell a good story.

If you missed it on the day don’t worry, all the presentations are on the Mendeley YouTube Channel, so you can watch them any time and let us know what you think! There are also some cool pictures of the day available on our Flickr page, we had a great time and thanks again to all our speakers and community!

Don’t Miss the Technology and Research Mendeley Masterclass at Social Media Week!

September 23, 2013 Alice Bonasio

This Thursday the 26^th September, Mendeley’s Co-founder Jan Reichelt will get together with 8 other innovators from the Open Knowledge Foundation, Zooniverse, Elsevier, Indiegogo, Team Cooper, The Lancet, JoVE and the Mobile Collective to discuss the many ways that technology can change, facilitate and improve things for researchers everywhere.

From “The Article of the Future” and the power of crowdfunding to enable research, to videos that enhance reproducibility and games that harness the power of crowds to solve some of the world’s most difficult scientific challenges, there’s certainly going to be a lot of food for thought…

We’re going to be right at the heart of all the activity in Social Media HQ which will also host events by the likes of Facebook, Nokia, Pinterest, Twitter and Google to name but a few. Spaces at the venue are extremely limited and you have to hold a VIP Pass to attend, but you can watch the event for free and live from wherever you are by following the live streaming link.

If you have any questions, comments or thoughts you’d like to put to the panel, do get in touch! You can leave a comment here, email me on alice.bonasio@mendeley.com or Tweet using the hashtag #smwSciTech

Importing ScienceDirect PDFs into Mendeley

September 20, 2013 Alice Bonasio2 Comments

We have recently improved ScienceDirect support with our web importer. This integration means that once a user has been authenticated on www.sciencedirect.com, the Mendeley Importer will recognize that they have the right to access full-text PDFs and enable them to download these directly to their Mendeley Library with just one click.

We understand that importing PDFs and references from the web is an important part of many researchers’ workflow. That’s why we’re aiming to support a wide range of journal websites, search engines, and will carry on bringing out many exciting new features like this one. Watch this space!

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Tag: Elsevier