Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Mendeley

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Original author(s)
  
Mendeley Ltd.

Initial release
  
August 2008 (2008-08)

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Developer(s)
  
Elsevier

Stable release
  
1.16.1 / 2016

Available in
  
English

Mendeley is a desktop and web program produced by Elsevier for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, macOS and Linux) and Mendeley for Android and iOS, with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.

Contents

Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers—storing copies of documents is at the user's discretion. Upon registration, Mendeley provides the user with 2 GB of free web storage space, which is upgradeable at a cost.

History

Mendeley, named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, was founded in November 2007 by three German PhD students and is based in London. The first public beta version was released in August 2008. The company’s investors include the former executive chairman of Last.fm, the founding engineers of Skype, and the former Head of Digital Strategy at Warner Music Group, as well as academics from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.

Mendeley won several awards in 2009: Plugg.eu "European Start-up of the Year 2009", TechCrunch Europas "Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society 2009", and The Guardian ranked it #6 in "Top 100 tech media companies".

On September 23, 2013, Mendeley announced iPhone and iPad apps that are free to install.

Purchase by Elsevier

Mendeley was purchased by the Elsevier publishing company in 2013. The deal price was speculated to be €50 million (US$65 million), following earlier speculation that it was between $69 million and $100 million. The sale led to debate on scientific networks and in the media interested in Open Access, and upset members of the scientific community who felt that the program's acquisition by publishing giant Elsevier, known for implementing restrictive publishing practices, the high prices of their journals (see The Cost of Knowledge), and publicly supporting the SOPA bill, was antithetical to the open sharing model of Mendeley. David Dobbs, in The New Yorker, suggested Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley could have been to acquire its user data and/or to "destroy or coopt an open-science icon that threatens its business model."

In 2012, Mendeley was one of the repositories for green Open Access recommended by Peter Suber. The recommendation was revoked in 2013 after Elsevier bought Mendeley.

Features

Mendeley is available either as a premium payable version or a basic version that is free but requires registration.

  • Mendeley Desktop, based on Qt, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • Automatic extraction of metadata from PDF papers.
  • Back-up and synchronization across multiple computers and with a private online account.
  • PDF viewer with sticky notes, text highlighting and full-screen reading.
  • Full-text search across papers.
  • Smart filtering, tagging and automatic PDF file renaming.
  • Citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice.
  • Import of documents and research papers from external websites (e.g., PubMed, Google Scholar, Arxiv) via browser bookmarklet.
  • BibTeX export/file sync.
  • Private groups to collaboratively tag and annotate research papers.
  • Public groups to share reading lists.
  • Social networking features (newsfeeds, comments, profile pages, etc.).
  • Usage-based readership statistics about papers, authors and publications.
  • iPhone app.
  • iPad app.
  • Android app.

    • Third-party tools allow the migration of content.

    References

    Mendeley Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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