Mendeley API – now public, now sexy?

Today we announce that the API is now open to anyone wishing to create fantastic tools with data that can change the world.

This past April we released a beta version of the Mendeley API and invited a few developers to start building applications on top of all of the rich data found here. (See NYTimes). Since then, we’ve been bulking up our data center, extending the API methods, and listening to the great feedback from the early developers.

We have also been working on a way to make working with such data more enticing, i.e. make it sexy enough for developers who have never ventured into building applications with science data.

With that in mind, the new developer portal was born out of lots of blood, sweat, and tears. Actually, we all loved working on this, because science has never been so cool and arguably never this accessible to the masses. It would have been impossible without the incredible work of Rosario García de Zúñiga, Steve Dennis and many others.

That said, happy coding and check out the Mendeley Developers Portal. And if you want your app showcased, let us know!

Jason Hoyt, PhD
Chief Scientist and VP of R&D
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Lord Martin Rees, Evan Harris, and Aleks Krotoski confirmed as keynote speakers at Science Online London 2010

We are honoured to announce that our Keynote Speakers for Science Online London 2010 are Lord Martin Rees, Evan Harris and Aleks Krotoski.

Widely acknowledged as one of the world’s preeminent cosmologists, Lord Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Trinity College, Cambridge – in addition to being a prolific author and speaker. He has received countless awards for his varied contributions to his field, and was this year elected to deliver the Reith Lectures for the BBC. Billed by TED as ‘one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity within the cosmos’, Lord Rees has also served on many bodies here in the UK and abroad, dealing with education and international collaboration in science.

Evan Harris was a doctor before entering politics, eventually becoming the Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Minister in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and Shadow Minister for Science until May this year. He remains a strong voice for science within Parliament.

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. For her PhD in Social Psychology, she examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She writes regularly for the Guardian and the Observer, and hosts a technology podcast called Tech Weekly. Just this February, she presented The Virtual Revolution for BBC Two – a documentary about the social history of the Web.

This will again be an amazing conference, aimed at changing the face of science. We are still a month away from the conference and have few tickets left, so you need to move fast if you want to join us.

You can follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf (comment with hashtag #solo10).

Ian Mulvany is joining Mendeley!

We’re delighted to announce a brilliant addition to Team Mendeley – Ian Mulvany! At Nature Publishing Group, Ian was the product manager responsible for both Connotea (Nature’s social bookmarking service) and Nature Network (an academic social network/blogging platform). We had bumped into Ian at various events and conferences, and each time, we were excited and inspired by his thoughts about the future of scientific collaboration, communication, and publishing. It got to the point that we simply couldn’t resist trying to get him on our team – and I’m extremely happy to say we succeeded: Next Monday, Ian will become our VP of New Product Development! Hell yes.

So, over to Ian:

————————————————-

At the heart of the academic literature are conversations about how we understand the world.  The content and context of what researchers in the academy do is fundamentally important in constructing what it is to be human. The advent of a deeply interconnected world, and the growth of academic output has, unsurprisingly, led to a situation where it becomes difficult to get a clear understanding, or even a clear picture, of the diversity of what we know about the world. Though advances in communication have led us to this place of over-saturation, tools that help us manage and work our way through all of the information available to us have been slow to emerge.

Mendeley has made real progress in creating tools that can help researchers both manage, and make sense of what is going on in the literature. When I was approached by Jan, Victor and Paul I was impressed by what they had achieved so far, and even more impressed by what their future plans are. They have assembled an amazing team, and I see a great opportunity to work with them to make a positive impact on the daily life of people working with academic literature.

In my career to date I have worked for scientific publishers, first at Springer, and then at Nature Publishing Group. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with communities of scientists, to work with great people in the publishing industry, and to help build some pretty interesting things. A consideration, though, has often been on trying to understand how these tools can fit within the framework of existing publishing business models.

By moving to a start-up company, focussed on just doing one thing, and doing it really well, I see a chance to work on rapidly producing tools that innovate not only in what they offer, but also in the business models that support them. Those are some of the reasons (did I mention the amazing team already?) that I’m absolutely delighted that I will be joining Mendeley full time from Monday the the 28th of June.

Mendeley Desktop v0.9.7 Released

If you have opened Mendeley Desktop since yesterday, you will have noticed that we have a new major release available and ready for auto-update.

Among the new features and improvements we would like to mention the re-designed Document Details pane on the right-hand side.

Mendeley PDF and side pane document details

Also new to this release is the ability to upgrade your Mendeley account. By upgrading your current free account (which will always be free!) to one of our premium options, you have access to more Web space for your personal and shared collections and the possibility to collaborate with larger groups.

Mendeley upgrade plans

Overall, there have been a lot of improvements made both on the interface and functional level with clearer dialogs and information display. For our Mac users, there have been quite a few UI improvements too and the Cmd+H shortcut properly hides the window!

This release includes a few bug fixes, improvements on existing features such as faster syncing and better sticky notes, and introduces some important new features. The release notes can be seen here.

If you have suggestions for improvements please let us know by visiting the feedback forum. If you encounter any problems using Mendeley or have questions to ask please e-mail support.

Science Online London 2010: Registration and Wiki

The registration for the Science Online London 2010 is now open!

There are only 95 days left until the conference starts in early September, so hurry up and grab your ticket from our registration website!

We are all very excited and looking forward to seeing you in London at the British Library!

Wiki page

We are organizing an action packed conference and we want your input to help shape the sessions. To this end, we have added a Wiki to the Science Online London website. Please use the Wiki to give us your suggestions and we will be looking at them continuously and integrate as many of them as possible.

For more information please visit the Science Online London 2010 website or directly go to the Wiki page.

And don’t forget to register at our registration website!

Co-hosted by:

Contact us:

Sponsor the conference:
Potential sponsors should contact Lou Woodley (l.woodley@nature.com).

General enquiries:
For general enquiries, please contact Sebastian Arcq (sebastian.arcq@mendeley.com).

: Follow @soloconf, hashtag #solo10

: Discuss in the Nature Network Forum

: Discuss in the Solo10 FriendFeed Room

Mendeley co-hosts Science Online London 2010

September 3-4, 2010 — British Library

We are delighted to announce that Nature Publishing Group, Mendeley, and the British Library will host Science Online London 2010 on 3-4 September (Fri/Sat) 2010. The event will take place at the British Library in St Pancras, London.

The event will bring together members of the scientific community who are interested in the use of web technologies for collaboration and communication. Science Online London will this year run over two days, building on the success of two previous one-day events held in 2009 and 2008. The British Library’s spacious facilities, with free wifi, on-site cafes and exhibitions, will also allow for a greater attendance.

Further details of the event will be announced via the official web site. Discussion of sessions, facilities and other matters can be found on the Nature Network forum. Follow the conference on Twitter @soloconf and comment with hashtag #solo10.

Details on how to register will follow shortly. To cover the increased costs of hosting the event, registration will cost £50.

For more information please visit the Science Online 2010 website.

Co-hosted by:

Contact us:

Sponsor the conference:
Potential sponsors should contact Lou Woodley (l.woodley@nature.com).

General enquiries:
For general enquiries, please contact Sebastian (sebastian.arcq@mendeley.com).

: Follow @soloconf, hashtag #solo10

: Discuss in the Nature Network Forum

: Discuss in the Solo10 FriendFeed Room

Introducing the Mendeley catalog search engine

Last Fall, we wrote about finding what is relevant to your research. We have a long way to go until we reach even half of our goals in helping you discover great content, but we are one tiny step closer as of today.

Today we launched a catalog search engine on the Mendeley Website. Moreover, we already have an advanced search that will be released in two weeks building on top of what you can use starting today. You can start using the basic search by going to the Research papers page.

What is different about Mendeley search compared to other literature search engines?
Two things standout: 1) Diversity of the literature and 2) ReaderRank

Diversity of the literature
Because Mendeley encompasses a broad range of academic disciplines, we have enormous diversity in our data set to draw results from. This is great, but also a challenge. The challenge comes from delivering results that are relevant to you and avoiding ambiguity with other disciplines. This WILL improve as we make tweaks and personalize the search experience. What’s great about this diversity though, is that inter-disciplinary content will surface if it is relevant.

ReaderRank
Relevant content is the strongest factor in the results you receive, but we wanted to take advantage of the knowledge of the crowds as well. With that in mind, we have developed an algorithm called ‘ReaderRank’ that will adjust results based on the level of readership for an article. This doesn’t mean the most read articles will always appear at the top, only that it is an additional measure in ranking your results. We have also taken care to prevent artificial enhancement of the results, i.e. gaming the readership. Over time, we hope to refine this algorithm by taking into account other measures of quality such as the reputation of who you trust and follow on Mendeley.

Once again, we will release an advanced search in two weeks that will let you refine search queries. We also want to encourage feedback. So, if you have any thoughts about the quality of results or what you might like to see in terms of search features, please let us know by going to our feedback forum.

Jason Hoyt, PhD | Research Director

Follow Jason and Mendeley on twitter for more announcements

Announcing the Mendeley Open API – Call for proposals

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

2collab users can now import their libraries into Mendeley

Some may have already heard the news that 2collab, a product of Elsevier, is no longer accepting new users and will be shutting down in due time (updated). 2collab and Scopus Product Manager, Michael Habib, announced this on January 16th at the Science Online conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Seeking to provide a reading list alternative for their 2collab users, it was also announced at Science Online that Mendeley was chosen to enable the opt-in transfer of any 2collab public library folders.

How it works:

1) If you are a 2collab user and do not have a Mendeley account you will first need to sign up here for free.
2) Once registered or for those already registered on Mendeley, go to the ‘Accounts’ link located at the top of the Dashboard page after signing into Mendeley.com.
3) At the bottom of the accounts page you will see a form for entering your 2collab username details.
4) Your public folders will be imported and the next time you open or sync the Mendeley desktop software those folders will be visible. They will also be available on the Web at Mendeley.com and can be viewed by proceeding to the ‘Library’ page.
5) Within the Mendeley desktop, you will then have the option to turn those folders into ‘public collections’ so that others can continue to stay up to date with what you are reading via RSS and other means. For example, here is a feed on Norovirus.

Please contact 2collab if you need any help specific to 2collab.

We wish the 2collab team the best and know that they are already working on some great stuff at Scopus and elsewhere.

Jason Hoyt, PhD
Research Director | Mendeley

Follow Jason & Mendeley on twitter

Announcing Science Online London 2009 at the Royal Institution

solologoFollowing last year’s successful “Science Blogging 2008” conference in London (see Victor’s blog post), we are happy to announce a slightly rebranded “Science Online London” as this year’s follow-up conference. The event will take place 22 August 2009 at the Royal Institution, London, and is co-hosted by Nature Network, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Mendeley. To accomodate for a wider range of topics (i.e. not only science blogging), we changed the name to “Science Online London”, and we encourage you to suggest topics for the programme.

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

As stated on the Science Online London webpage, “Topics include blogging and microblogging, online communities, open access and open data, new teaching and research tools, author identifies and measuring the impact of research.” Subscribe to the newsletter, send us your ideas – and let us know if you want to sponsor the conference. We’re all very much looking forward to meeting you at the Royal Institution on 22 August!
https://blog.mendeley.com/category/press-release/page/2/
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