UK-based start-up Mendeley has announced that the number of queries to its database from external applications has surpassed 100 million per month. More than 240 applications received for research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup and discovery - all of which have been developed in the past year - receive a constant flow of data from Mendeley.
The information fuelling this ecosystem has been crowdsourced by the scientific community itself, somewhat like Wikipedia. Using Mendeley's suite of document management and collaboration tools, in just three years its global community of 1.9 million researchers has created a shared database containing 65 million unique documents. This, according to recent studies, covers 97.2 to 99.5 percent of all research articles published. Commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents respectively, but access to their databases is licensed to universities for tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Mendeley's database is freely accessible under a Creative Commons licence, and it is reportedly the only one that allows third-party developers to build their own tools with the research data anywhere on the web, on mobile devices, or on the desktop. Moreover, because Mendeley's data is crowdsourced, it has a unique social layer, according to the company. Each document comes with anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. Mendeley's API also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley that the document is being discussed in.
The most popular apps built on Mendeley's platform seek to fulfil academia's need for faster and more granular metrics of scientific impact: ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org display a researcher's or a labs' real-time impact on the academic community, while Mendeley itself recently announced the first sales of its real-time research impact dashboard to academic institutions around the globe.
Hojoki pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. OpenSNP, winner of Mendeley's $10,001 Binary Battle prize, makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.
