Mendeley’s Open API Approach Is On Course To Disrupt Academic Publishing

TechCrunch: Mendeley’s ecosystem has now produced over 240 research apps drawing on open data from its database under a Creative Commons license. Those generate more than 100 million API calls to Mendeley’s database per month. While Elsevier now has around 100 third-party apps using its platform, it’s clear Mendeley is winning in the apps stakes.

The information fueling this ecosystem is being produced by the scientific community itself, putting a social layer over each document and producing anonymised real-time information about the academic status, field of research, current interests, location of, and keywords generated by its readers. The applications can cover research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery.