Elsevier announced today the acquisition of Mendeley for around $100million to Beef Up In Social, Open Education Data.
Researchers worldwide use Mendeley’s desktop and cloud-based tools to manage and annotate documents, create citations and bibliographies, collaborate on research projects and network with fellow academics.
“Mendeley is an innovative company with great culture, talent and collaborative spirit, and we will keep it that way,” said Olivier Dumon, Managing Director of Academic and Government Research Markets at Elsevier. “Not only that, but together we intend to scale and evolve Mendeley in ways that benefit the entire research community. We will provide greater access to content, data, and analytics tools to Mendeley’s users and its flourishing third-party app ecosystem, all of which will enable us to increase both Elsevier’s and Mendeley’s engagement with researchers.”
“Our vision is to make science more collaborative and open, and now we have the support of the world’s largest science information provider, whose resources will enable us to accelerate our progress towards this vision,” said Victor Henning, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley. “Above all, we will remember what has made Mendeley a success: ensuring that everything we do makes our users’ lives easier.”
Launched in late 2008, Mendeley was the brainchild of three PhD students wanting an easier way to manage their research papers and collaborate with colleagues overseas. They developed a desktop app that could automatically extract metadata and keywords from PDFs, thus turning loose collections of PDFs into structured, searchable research paper databases that were synchronized to the cloud.
From the start, they were thrilled by the idea that this crowd-sourced data would allow Mendeley to analyse research trends across academic disciplines in real time, show readership statistics for individual research papers, connect researchers with similar interests and generate research paper recommendations based on collaborative filtering.
To welcome Mendeley’s individual users, Elsevier is increasing the product’Freemium offer. The free storage level has expanded from 1 gigabyte to 2, and the amount of storage provided in the premium levels has expanded as well. For institutions, the
Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE) [http://blog.mendeley.com/design-research-tools/leading-universities-adopt-mendeley-data-to-accelerate-research-analytics-by-3-years] will continue to be available. MIE is a tool that helps universities analyse research activity in real time, complementing the traditional Impact Factor system of academic citations. It also enables librarians to extract more value from resources by optimizing their subscriptions and providing a better service to their researchers by tracking which journals are being read by faculty and students.
This union extends a history of collaboration between the two companies that began in 2009. For example, Elsevier has referred users to Mendeley, invited Mendeley to build apps on ScienceDirect [http://www.info.sciverse.com/sciencedirect/about ] using its open APIs, and sponsored Mendeley’s Science Online London conferences on Open Science.
