Mendeley is revolutionising the way researchers manage, share and discover new research.

The project
Mendeley combines a free desktop research management tool (for Windows, Mac OS and Linux) with an online account, enabling researchers to organise and collaboratively annotate papers, discover new data and contacts, and collaborate online. By downloading the desktop management tool (Mendeley Desktop) users can index and organise documents, create a personal digital library, annotate papers and add references. Users can also import papers from other websites and automatically create citations and bibliographies in their own publications using Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

Mendeley is aggregating the world’s largest open research database and enabling researchers to build applications on top of it. In doing so, Mendeley helps to accelerate scientific progress, drive scientific discovery, and make research more open.

For academics, managing a deluge of research papers can be an ongoing struggle and require expensive software. It is a solitary activity too: doing scientific research is inherently social, but the tools for sharing data often are not.

In response to this Mendeley is creating a technological infrastructure to become the most innovative professional research management tool. The Eurostars Mendeley MAKIN’ IT project aims to improve the research workflow of everyone who needs to handle and access academic knowledge, currently in the format of scholarly PDF documents.

‘Mendeley is revolutionising the way researchers manage, share and discover new research.’

Jan Reichelt, founder and director of Mendeley

About Mendeley
Launched in London in December 2008, Mendeley is a rapidly growing technology startup. The company’s investors include those who built Skype, Last.fm and Warner Music Group. Mendeley was awarded Plugg’s 2009 European Start-Up of the Year and Start-up Most Likely to Change the World for the Better, at Guardian Activate 2010.

The business application
With funding from Eurostars and the Technology Strategy Board, Mendeley is working to improve its technology and the algorithms it uses to handle large datasets. With more than 40 million indexed documents, it is on track to become the world’s largest research database, used by more than 550,000 academics and industry researchers.

Mendeley’s 10 largest user bases include the universities of Stanford, Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Edinburgh, Sao Paulo, Michigan, Oxford and Imperial College London.

About EUREKA Eurostars
EUREKA Eurostars is the first European funding and support programme specifically directed at innovative intensive and research performing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Its purpose is to provide funding for market-orientated research and development, specifically with the active participation of R&D-performing SMEs.

The Eurostars programme is a Eureka Network initiative. As an EU programme, each national government funding its own participants directly. Currently 27 countries are actively participating through the EUREKA network of national offices. In the UK the Technology Strategy Board is the funding body. Between 2009 and 2012 the Technology Strategy Board is investing £3 million through the Eurostars programme.

Key features

• To qualify for Eurostars funding a project must involve at least two organisations from two different participating countries.
• Eurostars funding is for high growth SMEs, defined as those companies that can show they deploy 10% of their staff or turnover to R&D (SME according to EU definition). There are additional rules for micro companies with fewer than 10 employees.
• SMEs, large companies, universities, and research centres can participate in the Eurostars project consortium however UK academics, educational institutes and large companies are not eligible for funding.
• The main consortium partner must be an R&D-performing small or medium-sized enterprise.

‘I strongly believe that Mendeley can change the face of science.’

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technical Officer Amazon.com & former research scientist at Cornell University.