Mendeley

Mendeley is a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.

Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers—storing copies of documents is at the user's discretion. Upon registration, Mendeley provides the user with 2 GB of free web storage space, which is upgrade able at a cost.

History

Mendeley founded in November 2007 by three German PhD students and is based in London. The first public beta version was released in August 2008. The team comprises researchers, graduates, and developers from a variety of academic institutions. The company’s investors include the former executive chairman of Last.fm, the former founding engineers of Skype, and the former Head of Digital Strategy at Warner Music Group, as well as academics from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.

Mendeley has won several awards: Plugg.eu "European Start-up of the Year 2009", TechCrunch Europas "Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society 2009", and The Guardian ranked it #6 in "Top 100 tech media companies".

Elsevier purchased Mendeley in 2013. The sale led to debate on scientific networks and in the media interested in Open Access, and upset some Mendeley users who felt that the program's acquisition by publishing giant Elsevier, known for implementing restrictive publishing practices, was antithetical to the open sharing model of Mendeley. David Dobbs, in The New Yorker, describes Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley as two-fold: to acquire its user data, and to "destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model."