Mendeley Platform - a publisher perspective

I attended the Mendeley breakout (mere hours after the announcement that Mendeley had been bought by Elsevier). Richard Bennett provided an overview of what Mendeley is with some interesting facts and figures. He did not elaborate on the sale but assured us that it was business as usual with more benefits, for instance more space for users libraries for free.

I think the general mood in the room was that time will tell whether Elsevier ownership will deter sharing or damage the service in any way. Also time will tell exactly how the integration will look in terms of mashing together the researcher data in Mendeley with Elsevier's existing data (like citations in Scopus).

As a publisher my main interest is in the view Elsevier will have of institutional research interests and strengths - beyond published research. As a librarian I'd be interested in what Elsevier will know about institutional research trends and how institutions compare in various areas. Elsevier already offer "planning solutions" like SciVal but this gives deeper penetration in terms of current research and a lot more data.

I'd say watch this space for some interesting offerings.

Key facts:

• Mendeley see high correlation between used papers and later citation activity.  
• Mendeley has 2.3m users. 68k new users per month. 89m unique docs in database (total 381m docs in users libraries). 227k groups 
• 1500 volunteer advocates globally who "push" Mendeley because they love it. 
• Now offering auto-push directly into institutional repository based on embargo periods.