The Auricle

by Derek Morrison (first posted 7 September 2009, updated 18 September 2009)

With the strapline “Organize, share and discover research papers” Mendeley is clearly pitching its hat into the academic software ring. There is certainly an interesting mix of people behind this enterprise who have obviously decided that there is a business opening not currently being met by existing ‘open’ academic repository solutions and so have set out to create, in their own words “a Last.fm of research“. It will only prove sustainable if a significant number of inherently conservative academic communities decides that this .com offering offers something of higher value than other contenders in this space. As long as the locus-of-control remains with the user rather than the company they could end up carving an important niche for themselves. But, all such ‘free’ services still need an income stream and it’s kind of hard to work out where this one is going to come from if its ‘academic’ branding is not going to be compromised by advertising. If Mendeley was to replicate the Last.fm business model then a ‘free’ service would be advertising supported or to put in in the words of the Last.fm site subscribing users enjoy: “Uninterrupted radio listening; Ad-free browsing and streaming; Recent visitors to your profile”.

But I’m not sure that a successful business model developed for the recreational listening of audio streams necessarily translates to a context where the ‘streams’ are learned papers particularly when DSpace, EPrints et al and the open access publishing movement are already occuping this space. Mendeley, however, does convey a sense of investment in design and high production values, so who knows, it may gain considerable traction.

Update 18 September 2009
The Guardian’s Victor Keegan waxes lyrical about Mendeley in his column How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough (N.B. the 17 September 2009 paper version titled exactly the same article as Science Papers Join Jukeboxes of the Web).

Also, Mendely’s William Gunn has posted a comment to this post which Auricle readers may find of interest; particularly the reference to OAI.

A few further questions come to mind.

First who will own the content uploaded into Mendeley?

Second, all cloud or online services carry the risk of disappearing into the ether or being taken over by those with a business model which may conflict with those who have built the communities and contributed the content . The maxim for the digital era “Lots of copies keeps stuff safe” is becoming even more relevant with advent of the cloud model and so it is essential that there will be no inadvertent impediments to achieving this. The ” Do no evil” Google’s Data Liberation Front is a clever acknowledgement that many users will need such reassurance before they will commit. Whether they will actually bother to make copies is another question, but they will like the idea that they can.

Third, how wil the open peer review model implied in Keegan’s Guardian article be received by communities whose traditional judgement of quality is grounded in a less open model of peer review? Will a Mendeley peer reviewed article hold the same weight as a tradtionally peer reviewed article?

Fourth, how disruptive to existing business models and publicly-funded HE initiatives could services such as Mendeley be? Ideally, Mendeley could be viewed as another contributor to a healthy digital ecosystem. From another perspective if Mendeley (or similar) gains more traction and the widespread confidence of the global academic community other initiatives may find it more difficult to fund their activities, e.g. there are now very few contenders for the search engine crown. As long term Auricle readers will know I am endlessly fascinated by the speed by which institutional leaders in particular seem inclined to lock their institutions into just one perceived IT ‘solution’ in a fast-changing world.

Personally, I’m glad to see Mendeley as a new kid on the academic block if for no other reason that, if Keegan’s optimism is founded it could shake things up a bit. But we need to keep our eye on how the Mendeley business model evolves. If they get it wrong then the communities they need to thrive will abandon the ship with a speed that suggests there is plague on board.