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

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