Mendeley is initially two things: Mendeley Desktop is free academic software for managing and sharing research papers. Mendeley Web is a free research network which lets you access your papers online, discover research trends and connect to like-minded researchers.

Mendeley Desktop is already a useful tool without any sharing functionalities (but with automatic metadata extraction). It’s free, and it can in many ways already replace existing, and very expensive PDF and citation management tools which are out there. If that leaves a bad taste in anyone’s mouth, I trust it’s because we do something better.

On top of that there’s Mendeley Web: here we are aggregating metadata (and this doesn’t have anything to do with the acutaly content of a paper) based on our users and display statistics about up-and-coming papers, most important authors and articles, or most read publications. We call this “A Last.fm for Research” - based on your reading behaviour Mendeley will aim to recommend you papers and introduce you to like-minded people based on your digital library and reading behaviour (once there’s enough data).

But just start with PDF and citation management, desktop- and web-based… we hope Mendeley can already take away some of the major problems researchers encounter.

Thanks
Jan

Pete is 100% right. Obtaining the initial community is the hardest part and I don’t think any of the services out there have gotten to that point. There are three types of science networks out there: The linkedin clones, the research sharers, and the publication sharers. My site falls somewhere among all three.

Now, the linkedin clones are useless, so don’t even try visiting BioMedExperts, academia.edu, scilink, etc.

The research sharing sites have a decent idea, but as my boss would argue e-mail is just as good, if not better. I’d argue that the research sharing sites are playing with fire. All it would take would be one not very savvy phisher to post a faux link on a public area of the site and then be able to gain access to critical data. Banks haven’t gone social for a reason: you can’t trust the public, or your users.

Pub sharing sites like PubGet, Labmeeting, and Mendeley are interesting although when each has a DMCA link on the front page of their site, you can understand how these sites might eventually disappear as a result of legal problems. These Napsters for science are already generating a bad taste in many publishers’ mouths.

It will be interesting to see how these sites fare during these tough financial times. I guess sometimes there’s a benefit to being a one man show with no overhead

—I would also think that the creators would have to initially advertise to capture a critical mass.—

Advertising costs money, money requires a business model, and as far as I’ve seen, most social networking ventures lack both.

I have tried tp get discussions going in Niche areas via blogs, i.e, like siRNA transfection efficiency. I know there are some interesting Wiki’s out there on methods (see Molecular Station).

I believe the challenge with sustained social networking is capturing comunities that resonate with one another. When I look at profressional social networking “like attracts like”. I wonder if a bioscience site that could parse to level of “Neuroscience Post Doc doing basic Alzheimer’s research would attract a sustainable” community.

I would also think that the creators would have to intitially advertise to capture a critical mass. There would also have to be enough pertinent info to capture and keep visitors. Facebook had to start somewhere. In the meantime, I’ll keep searching…