Mendeley LogoIf you’ve been a regular reader here at MBL, it’s almost certain that you’ve noticed my search for software to organize PDFs, namely scientific papers. I tried most of the software available for Windows and Linux (I don’t own a Mac) and ended up working with Zotero (which does more than just PDF management).

A while back I found Mendeley and have been using it for my thesis research. Zotero still has space in my daily motion but it’s for non-PDF related tasks, but I digress.

I’ll be writing more about my experience with Mendeley and all the cool new features they have recently been pumping out or their London offices.

Meanwhile, I got the chance to interview Victor Henning, one of the three Mendeley co-founders and here’s the outcome:

When and how did the idea to create Mendeley come about?

A few years ago, Jan and I were meditating high up in the Himalayan mountains, and on the seventh hour of the seventh day we heard a voice telling us to create Mendeley. True story. But since no one believes it, here’s what we usually tell people:

Soon after Jan and I had started our Ph.D.s in 2004, we realized that finding relevant literature was quite difficult if you were working in a field of research that you didn’t know too well. So we had the idea for a 3D visualization tool which would automatically group papers into related cluster, then map out relationships between academic disciplines and theories.

However, we soon realized that, first of all, we would need data for this. That’s where we got the idea for developing software which could extract metadata, keywords and cited references from your collection of research papers automatically, then create this 3D visualization for you – that was in 2005. That’s when our focus shifted to bibliography and reference management, with a social twist.
Interestingly, our first alpha and beta versions of Mendeley (which were released in early 2008) still contained the 3D visualization tool, but we took it out for the public beta release because it was too slow and clumsy – but we’re planning to sneak it back in again at some point.

So, over time, the idea evolved to what it is now: A combination of desktop software and social network for managing and sharing academic papers, with research statistics, recommendation engines, and an open, semantic research paper database coming down the road.

Why Mendeley? Where did the name come from? Were there other potencial names before settling on Mendeley?

When we started developing the desktop software, our working title was “Literacula” because we imagined how it would sink its teeth into literature and automatically suck the metadata out of it. Besides, the cheesy “B-movie monster” sound of the name made us giggle. Unfortunately, no one else liked it, let alone knew how to pronounce it.

So after going through a whole bunch of other bad ideas, we thought that derivations of scientists’ names might be a good thing: There was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev (alternatively spelled Mendeleev), who developed the periodic table of elements, and Gregor Mendel, who is often called the “father of modern genetics”. We liked the analogies to our vision: Just as Gregor Mendel studied the inheritance of traits in plants, Mendeley will enable you to trace how ideas and academic theories evolve and cross-pollinate each other. Dmitri Mendeleyev formed the periodic table based on the properties of known elements, then used this data to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered – and Mendeley will help you discover new literature based on the known elements in your library.

This was the short version – if you want to read the full story behind our naming choice (including the list of bad ideas we had!), you can find it on our blog, here.

Was the success of Papers, the award winning Apple software application, an added reason/motivation to develop Mendeley?

Neither Jan nor I are Mac users, so we hadn’t heard of Papers until sometime in 2007. At that point, we were already working on Mendeley almost full-time. I believe the first version of Papers was released in 2006, right? But yes, the good reviews for Papers were an added motivation once we discovered it. We also met Mek (its main developer) a couple of times last year – he’s a really nice guy.

How has the general uptake been? Have the reviews been positive?

The reception and the reviews have been very positive so far. I think yours was probably one of the first! Of course, many reviews have pointed out that it’s still beta software, so there have been a couple of bugs and stability issues, but by now we have a pretty stable version that researchers around the world use productively. For example, Dartmouth College’s library recently named us the “Best Bet for PDF Management”, and many researchers tell us they’ve replaced EndNote with Mendeley.

Your software seems to aim at being both Desktop and web-based. Although the desktop version has seen further progress, is the web-based version planned to be as fully functional? And where does social networking fit in?

Yes, the plan is to offer the same functionality on the web that we offer on the desktop – that is managing, tagging and sharing your papers, automatic metadata and reference extraction, full-text search, a PDF viewer and annotation tool, and more. You’ll see many of these features on the web in the coming weeks and months.

The social networking aspect of Mendeley has been and will be centered around the research paper libraries of our users. First of all, you need to be contacts with another user on the Mendeley network in order to share research papers. We’ll also enable users to make their library public (entirely or parts of it), so that users can discover other researchers with similar interests. Based on the papers in their library, we’ll also match researchers with similar interests to each other – provided they have opted in to that, to preserve privacy. I did my Ph.D. on the role of emotions in decision making, and I would have liked to meet other Ph.D. students researching the same topic – on Mendeley, they’d be recommended to me automatically.

Also, when you have a profile on the Mendeley network, you will soon get personalized research statistics about your own publications. Say you’ve published a few papers and you’d like to know who’s reading them: Mendeley will give you a breakdown of your audience by academic discipline, geographic region, research interests, academic position etc. Again, to preserve privacy, it won’t let you identify your readers individually, unless they’ve chosen to make their library (and thus the papers they’re reading) public.



And it’s also FREE, which is obviously very attractive for the typical grad student. Are there already specific plans on how you will monitize your services?

The voice in the Himalayan mountains left us specific instructions about that. In any case, whatever is free will always stay free! We won’t charge for any of the things which are available now. Later this year, we will add additional premium features which will be available for a very reasonable monthly fee – e.g. less restrictions on sharing papers, more upload space, customized access to research statistics, or additional group management and collaboration tools. We’ve also had requests from private sector R&D departments for an in-house version of the Mendeley sharing server.

Further down the road, we’ll also look into advertising on the website. Also, we’ve had some interest from academic publishers about using Mendeley as a distribution system – very much like an “iTunes for research papers”.



Mendeley’s current chairman is Stefan Glaenzer, which previously held the same position at the ubiquitous Last.fm. How has his experience helped with the project’s development? How was he brought aboard?

Jan and I know Stefan since 2003. He was a guest lecturer in Entrepreneurship at our university, the WHU Koblenz. Together with two of our professors, he published a book with case studies about start-ups, to which Jan and I contributed a case.

So when we had the idea for Mendeley, he was the first person we tried to get on board as a business angel. That was in the summer of 2007 – Last.fm had just been sold to CBS, so it was great timing for us as Stefan was looking for a new challenge. He holds a Ph.D., too, so he knows the problems that researchers are facing on a daily basis.
Moreover, there were many conceptual similarities between Last.fm and Mendeley’s vision, so we managed to snag him as a co-founder! Before Last.fm, he had founded Germany’s first auction website (before eBay) and one of Europe’s biggest blogging platforms, so his experience with pretty much anything has been invaluable. Where to focus at which stage of the start-up process, how to hire the right team, how get further funding – he’s been helpful in all of these areas. He was also the one who introduced us to Skype’s founding engineers, who are now our investors as well. Combined, they obviously know a lot about building large-scale client-server-applications, and how to make them user-friendly, fast and safe.



One last question: Since all three founders of Mendeley studied in Germany, how come are you based in London, UK?

What did Rick say again in Casablanca? “We came for the water”. We just love rain, that’s why we’re here. Also, our third co-founder, Paul, was already working on London as a freelance web developer; Stefan was already here because of Last.fm; we wanted to be an English-language company because science is mostly English-language, too; and there are great universities in front of our doorstep – Imperial College, King’s College, UCL, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge, just to name a few. And apart from the weather, London is a nice place to live. Just consider this: We rented our first office from Monty Python’s Michael Palin and met him at work almost every day.

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