London-based German start-up Mendeley is promising to do for academia what Last.fm did for music
For Jan Reichelt, dealing with the rapid expansion of his business shouldn't prove too much of a problem. Reichelt contributed to a book about fast-growth start-ups while studying entrepreneurialism at university in Germany. The book was put together by Reichelt's lecturer, Stefan Glaenzer, who also happened to be one of Germany's most renowned entrepreneurs. Glaenzer was executive chairman at Last.fm, a hugely successful social networking music site, and an experienced entrepreneur and business angel. It proved an auspicious meeting.
At the time, Reichelt, alongside business partners Victor Henning and Paul Foeckler, was working on a piece of software that allowed PhD students to collate and manipulate PDF research documents. "There was no tool that solved the most urgent problem as a researcher, which was how to handle a mass of PDF documents," says Reichelt. The trio created a personal library for students who wanted to keep all their research documents in one place. "Our system allowed you to just drag and drop PDFs—it would then extract all the relevant data for you."
The three soon realised the software had "additional benefits". As the network of users grew, it was possible to track which documents likeminded users were reading, or even how many students were reading particular research papers, thereby offering an indication of how popular that paper was. In effect, it was a social networking tool for published research, with the potential to do for academia what Last.fm had done for music. They pitched it to Glaenzer. "He was immediately convinced," says Reichelt.
Glaenzer led the first round of funding and became its executive chairman. They named it Mendeley, says Reichelt, which is an amalgamation of the two scientists, Mendel and Mendeleev. "Mendeleev left spaces in his Periodic Table for new things to be discovered. It's the same with us: we will be able to discover statistics that weren't available before." Those newly available statistics may well go on to revolutionise academic research, allowing previously unknown researchers to shine.
The first aim is to disrupt an oligopolistic market. "Right now if I want to publish a paper, I want it to be published in a journal with a high-quality reputation. The impact of that journal reflects on my work," explains Reichelt. Those journals are published by a small number of large publishing houses, each with their own databases of the most important academic research. The journals with the biggest impact on the academic community are usually the hardest for researchers to get their papers into. But measuring the impact of these journals is based on an archaic, almost arbitrary process. One highly-cited article is usually enough to boost a journal's impact and therefore its circulation, whether or not the quality of its other articles are of the same standard.
Mendeley aims to level the playing field by exposing the "long tail" of academic research. It offers usage statistics that judge an article on its merits rather than by the journal it has been published in. In theory, articles of merit will rise to the top, meaning useful research becomes more readily available to the right people. And because Mendeley measures the popularity of a research study in real time, researchers no longer have to wait to see how many times an article has been cited to judge its worth. "We want to speed up the process of making important information available," says Reichelt. Whether the adoption of Mendeley will mean that so-called important authors are read less, or less important authors are read more, remains to be seen.
The social tools embedded in Mendeley enable students and researchers to find all kinds of articles that may be related to their own work, and to promote them, based on metrics, such as how long they spend reading them, or even whether they read them at all. "Article-level metrics can judge the impact of a particular article on the academic community," says Reichelt. "What is the adoption of my article? How often has it been downloaded?"
Mendeley already has over one million articles on its database, but all the principle academic research remains copyrighted by the major publishing houses. Reichelt says the company is in talks to licence this content and turn Mendeley into "the iTunes of the research world". iTunes, of course, doesn't hold the copyright for the content pushed through its interface. "It would be the same with Mendeley," explains Reichelt. "If we know a user is reading a certain article we can tell him of other related articles and then serve him that article. Either the user or the user's institution would pay the publisher for that download."
The publishers, who include Reed Elsevier and Springer, currently charge universities for "bundles" of these reports, which are expensive, says Reichelt, and may contain a great deal of information the university doesn't want. "Prices are going up. University libraries can't afford to keep up their subscriptions. So many subscriptions are cancelled, which means researchers are no longer getting access to the journals they need." Reichelt proposes "debundling" the process, enabling researchers to get access to content via a pay-per-document model.
Mendeley is essentially a German start-up, with German capital, but based in London, employing UK people. Reichelt says it was the most important decision they have had to make. "London is a big hub for developers and support people. It is also the finance hub of Europe," he says. It's also a start-up base with added kudos. "Every important company has something in London. Go to the US and say you are London-based: people will know. If you are based in a small town in Germany its difficult to be taken as seriously. If you want to build an international company you have to be in London."
Reichelt says his background in entrepreneurial studies has come in useful. He says you learn quickly how to manage with fewer resources, and that gives you focus. There are, he says, plenty of other applications for the Mendeley model, but sticking to academic research, for now at least, offers a greater chance of success. Scarce resources have an impact on recruitment, too. "People are the most important thing. In a small start-up with five people, where one person is not performing as they should be then that has a bigger impact than one out of 5,000," he says. "It's better to go with one very good person than with three medium people."
Posted 20 May 2009 : Director.co.uk
