In my absence from the Web over the last few years, I was actually attempting to graduate from university with an MSc. Plus I wanted a job in a real company which valued me, and I wasn’t entirely sure if any company wanted to hire someone who kept talking about the Web or technologies or pink gadgets. Or cam whoring occasionally. Nonetheless all that’s over now because I graduated end of last year and last week we just submitted a paper to the IEEE.
Anyway, recently I stumbled on Mendeley, which actually allows you to share your papers with the research community. It is somewhat like open-source IEEE or something along those lines. IEEE has long been the to-go source for Electrical Engineers but you always had to somewhat pay for what you got, or a membership or subscription to get the papers and to get references. So in tune of that, Mendeley is the social network for researchers. Social networks work only if there are a ton of people getting on it, but then again, we all know that viral marketing will prove its time and a researcher telling a researcher telling a researcher might work. Still, its worth a shot to take a look.
IMO, IEEE won’t disappear anytime soon. But it has to change the way it thinks and works because there would be more networks like Mendeley around.
Check it here: Mendeley
Hi Summerrainx! Thanks for writing about Mendeley!
I’m working as a Community Liaison for Mendeley, so let me quickly comment on your post.
Mendeley doesn’t intend to compete with IEEE as a publisher; it’s more of a complement to what they provide. Because there’s two parts to Mendeley, the desktop client and Mendeley Web, you don’t necessarily have to have a large network for it to be useful for your own work. The desktop client alone makes it easy for you to organize your PDFs, even if you don’t use the social features. I wrote a post about how immediately useful features are a great way to bootstrap a community, and I think Mendeley Desktop is a great example of this.
Of course, the social features are a great add on to this, and in the next release Mendeley will enable you to annotate PDFs internally and share the marked-up papers with your lab or department.
Thanks again for writing about Mendeley. Please let me know if there is anything you’d particularly like to see in the next release.
Best wishes,
Mr. Gunn
Hi Mr. Gunn,
Mendeley may not be competing with IEEE as a publisher, but lately more and more educational institutes are embracing setting their papers in the open unlike the pay-to-view usual route of IEEE: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/openmit.html so the whole establishment of IEEE would have to rethink themselves.
Otherwise, I used to use Papers to organize my gazillion PDFs and I paid for that as a student so I think that Mendeley is a nice thing to have. The social features included.
I’ll have to relook through Mendeley to think of more feature requests, because right now I stopped reading research papers and started focusing on development work, but otherwise if I do I’ll email you!
Joanna
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