U.K. Start-Up Opens Up Science Research - Tech Europe - WSJ

“A U.K. start-up is taking on the scientific-journal establishment by providing open data in an effort to help some two million researchers globally find documents and information.  Mendeley, a scientific-data aggregation platform sometimes described as a cross between Twitter and Facebook for scientists, started life as a simple tool for researchers, but has transformed itself into an open platform, allowing developers to build apps using that rich scientific metadata.  CEO Victor Henning said the service has data on some 65 million unique documents that together cover—according to the site—97.2% to 99.5% of all research articles published. There are some 3,000 developers who have produced 240 apps that use the platform to help researchers. The company said Wednesday that those apps make 100 million requests for information every month.  ‘The concept [of Mendeley] came out of wanting to help researchers manage documents,’ said Mr. Henning. “All of our users — about 2 million of them, mainly in the U.S. and U.K. — use it to organize tons of research papers they have on their hard drives. They can drag and drop a document into the desktop app and it will automatically extract all the relevant information, including author, title, volume, journal, keywords, the full text and so forth.  ‘The big idea behind it was if we can get millions of scientists to use our software to extract information, we can crowd source all of that information to do interesting things with the data.’ Each document comes with anonymized real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. Mendeley’s application program interface, or API, also adds information about related research documents and public groups on Mendeley in which the document is being discussed.   In return for users submitting that data, Mendeley makes it available to the community — though not the full text of the article, which is subject to copyright – and accessible via an open API, the method by which apps talk to the Mendeley servers.  Examples of the sort of apps developed include ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org, which display a researcher’s or a lab’s real-time impact on the academic community.   ‘By sharing a large corpus of open-licensed data, Mendeley is laying the foundation for a whole new science of the making and spreading of scientific knowledge. This offers coders and researchers alike an unprecedented opportunity to map and measure the real-time impact of scientific research,’ ReaderMeter.org creator Dario Taraborelli said in a prepared statement.  According to Mr. Henning, most user data is anonymized. ‘If you look at a particular document you can see that it has 5,000 readers and you can see the breakdown by academic discipline, or location, or research interests, or academic status, or what else these people are reading.’ Individual data on a user isn’t normally available...  The service is a classic ‘freemium’ model. But in addition, there are additional group services and a recently announced university or institution-level dashboard that allows a lab or other research establishment to see the impact of their published documents.”