London, UK - When Mendeley’s founders started writing their PhDs, they wondered why there wasn’t a more convenient way of managing and sharing their collection of research papers. So they set out to develop a free research tool themselves, which is launching into public beta today on www.mendeley.com.

Mendeley Desktop, a software client application available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, automatically extracts metadata, full-text and cited references from PDF files, builds up a personal research library, and offers sophisticated searching, tagging, and filtering functionality. It lets researchers share, synchronize and annotate their digital libraries collaboratively. Data from Mendeley Desktop is exchanged with Mendeley Web, an online research network where users can back up and access their library database, discover the most widely read papers in their academic discipline, and connect to like-minded scientists and researchers. “As the database of Mendeley Web grows, you will be able to view statistics about emerging research topics in every academic discipline, and readership statistics for each individual paper” explains Victor Henning, one of Mendeley’s co-founders. “Soon we will also include a recommendation engine. Basically, it’s like a Last.fm for research.”

This caught Stefan Glänzer’s attention. As seed investor and executive chairman, he helped Last.fm (www.last.fm) grow into the world’s largest social music network with over 20 million users. A few years earlier, he himself had been in academia, having financed his PhD through work as a DJ. “I wish I’d had a tool like Mendeley back then” says Mr. Glänzer. “There are striking similarities between the concepts: Based on its Audioscrobbler software, which helps users share and discover music, Last.fm was able to create the world’s largest open music database. Based on Mendeley Desktop, which helps users manage, share and discover research papers, Mendeley could achieve the same for academia.”

After joining Mendeley as executive chairman, Mr. Glänzer brought the team in touch with the former founding engineers of Skype (www.skype.com), who had recently invested in academic publisher Versita (www.versita.com) through their investment fund ASI (www.asi.ee). Mendeley’s software won them over. “There are plenty of websites that want to become ‘the Facebook for researchers’” explains Eileen Broch, ASI’s investment director. “Mendeley, however, is not just another social network. It’s a truly valuable integration of software and web technologies that solves some of researchers’ day-to-day problems – which is why we decided to invest.”

Posted: 09|3|08 at 7:35 am. Filed under: Press Release.