Mendeley


Mendeley is a company based in London, UK, which provides products and services for academic researchers. It is most known for its reference manager which is used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.

History

Mendeley was named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev, and founded in London in November 2007 by three German PhD students. The first public beta version was released in August 2008. The company's investors included some people previously involved with Last.fm, Skype, and Warner Music Group, as well as academics from Cambridge and Johns Hopkins University.

Early success

Mendeley won several awards in 2009 including 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".
In 2012, Mendeley was one of the repositories for green Open Access recommended by Peter Suber. The recommendation was revoked after Elsevier bought Mendeley.

Purchase by Elsevier

Mendeley was purchased by the academic publisher Elsevier in early 2013. The deal price was speculated to be €50 million. The sale led to debate on scientific networks and in the media interested in Open Access, and upset members of the scientific community who felt that the Mendeley's acquisition by Elsevier was antithetical to Mendeley's open sharing model.
David Dobbs, in The New Yorker, suggested Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley could have been to acquire its user data and/or to "destroy or coopt an open-science icon that threatens its business model."
This was contrasted to a non-profit service like Unpaywall, which marketed itself as not susceptible to a sell-out to Elsevier.

Extensions to product line

After acquisition, Mendeley subsequently extended its product line into new areas while continuing to iterate on its reference manager.
On September 23, 2013, Mendeley announced iPhone and iPad apps. An Android app followed shortly after.
On January 12, 2015, Mendeley announced the acquisition of Newsflo, a service which provided links to press coverage of researchers' work. The functionality was subsequently incorporated into Mendeley Feed and Mendeley Profile.
In April 2016, Mendeley Data, a platform for sharing citable research datasets online, was promoted out of beta.
In October 2016, Mendeley Careers was launched to help researchers to locate job opportunities. As of August 2019, Mendeley Careers offered 295k science and technology job opportunities.
On May 24, 2019, Mendeley announced two new products: Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite.

Products

Mendeley is freemium software.
In 2018, an update to Mendeley resulted in some users losing PDFs and annotations stored in their accounts. Elsevier fixed the issue for most users after a number of weeks.