Tag: Platform

On the future of our Open API: feature updates and eating our own dog food

drgunn8 Comments

There have been a few guiding principles that have directed the progress and business strategy of Mendeley from the very beginning, and chief among these is our mission to make research more collaborative and open. We want to build a bridge to a more modern way of using the web for scholarly communication.

To that end, we’ve been hard at work lately improving our Open API, as it’s a critical part of our strategy. We currently serve more than 100 million API calls per month to about 260 third-party apps. In addition, our API powers the analytics dashboard of the Mendeley Institutional Edition, and powers the Institutional Repository sync via Symplectics Elements. We hope to see the numbers of client applications grow, and to that end, we’ve made some fundamental changes to the API. Our overall goal is to further open up our data and extend third-party developers’ capabilities, so here’s a summary of recent and upcoming changes:Read More »

Announcing the Mendeley Open API – Call for proposals

Jason Hoyt2 Comments

It’s almost here, the Mendeley Open API that third-party developers can use to create their own mashups. The API won’t be immediately available to everyone quite yet, but we would like to invite any developers interested in early access to submit a proposal of what you envision building.

The call for proposals is open until Friday, May 14th. Selected developers will be notified between now and May 21st.

For more information on how to submit your proposal please see the Open API page.

For more information about the API methods please see the API methods page.

If you take a look at our feedback page you will quickly see how many feature requests we are getting on a daily basis. We would love to implement all of them, but unfortunately that isn’t possible. Additionally, many researchers require niche-specific tools that are not suitable for inclusion in a general purpose tool such as Mendeley. The obvious solution to both of these problems is to open up the data and let creative developers and inspired academics create what they need on top of that data.

With the Open API, you will have access to both aggregated statistics and your own library. Developers can create applications to improve your research experience (for privacy reasons, you will need to authenticate yourself before third-party applications can access your data). Libraries and publishers can build simple Web apps to pull in article-level metrics to enhance what you see when visiting their websites.

We are extremely excited to see what the community and developers, who for years have not had access to this type of data, can create with the API tools. For far too long, this type of data has been siloed away from the general developer community; even worse, the end-user researchers. The richness of academic knowledge is finally in an accessible and open form, so that “Silicon Valley” and other creative developers around the world have a practical means to participate in scientific research. The world is now connected to academia.

Jason Hoyt, PhD | Research Director

Follow Jason and Mendeley on twitter for more announcements