Financial and ideological backing from EUREKA Eurostars, an R&D initiative funded by the European Community and the UK’s Technology Strategy Board, has reportedly helped rapidly establish Mendeley as a serious player in the academic industry.
Mendeley is a research collaboration platform helping millions of researchers and scientists organise their research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest papers in their subjects. Through the use of collaborative filtering technology seen on sites like Last.fm, Mendeley learns about users when they add documents to their personal libraries. It then recommends related articles that may have been missed, and helps connect them to people with similar interests.
The Eurostars project brought together Mendeley with the Estonian Technology Competence Centre in Electronics-, Info- and Communication Technologies (ELIKO) and Austria’s Competence Centre for Knowledge Management (Know-Center). Building on their complementary fields of expertise, the three organisations collaborated with one another to produce a number of Web 2.0 services for researchers that operate efficiently at large scale. The services leverage the wisdom gained from crowdsourcing in combination with exploiting modern semantic technologies (e.g. Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to produce novel tools that provide researchers with information on the impact of their research. This is done in real time.
The resulting technological improvements and subsequent funding received from Eurostars and the UK Technology Strategy Board have allowed Mendeley to create a database of more than 225 million indexed documents. Mendeley has also signed up over 1.6 million users from across academia and industry world-wide. It has now reportedly become the largest crowd-sourced academic research database in the world.
EUREKA Eurostars is the first European funding and support programme specifically directed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) working in R&D. Since 2009, the UK funding body, the Technology Strategy Board, has invested over £3 million into projects as part of the Eurostars programme.
