How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/last-fm-mendeley-victor-keegan

Mendeley has launched a research paper organizing service with software that is similar to the existing PDF organizing tools (Zotero, CiteULike, Connotea). Not only does Mendeley work really well to help organize citations, it also keeps statistics on what people are reading and from what field of study those readers come from. This way, users can look at the statistics for what is most popular in their field.

The article from the Guardian is particularly enthusiastic about Mendeley being the revolutionizing thing that the internet/researchers/science have been waiting for. They say Mendeley "shows the second phase of the dotcom boom is throwing up great, practical ideas". This is from a technology blog. After reading a few statements like this I downloaded Mendeley and tried it out. It is pretty interesting to log in and look at the statistics they provide, but I'm not sure if it will go much further than being interesting to look at. The have a lot of people joining very quickly, so it might be possible that Mendeley will change the face of science (this is what Dr. Werner Vogels of Amazon predicts).

In Mendeley authors can upload PDFs of their work and include it in the Mendeley database. Mendeley has a very interesting take on the legality of this in their Mendeley FAQ. They say that most journals are usually okay with authors "self-archiving", which is not defined. Mendeley's simple answer to self-archiving is "Simply self-archive your preprint as well as your postprint, and wait to see whether the publisher ever requests removal." After downloading and using Mendeley a little bit I am still not clear on how much access is provided to the articles that authors upload.

There's one thing that the author of this column wrote that I do not understand:

"Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of "real-time" citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth."

What is this lengthy procedure of acquiring citations? I've asked a couple of people about this and nobody knows what he's talking about. Is he somehow confusing this with the lengthy procedure of peer review? He doesn't actually mention peer review in the blog at all. Maybe the technology column of the Guardian isn't the most reliable source on how scholarly publishing works.

Blogs (hangingtogether.org, Open Access News) have mentioned that the metadata in Mendeley is horrible. This looks like another case of why won't fill in organization start fill in the practice we like. The metadata might not be that great, but providing stellar metadata is probably outside the scope of Mendeley's goals. One component of Mendely is to crowdsource articles, which points the argument back to folksonomies vs. cataloging. While it would be great to have a service that uses both tagging and quality metadata, I'm not sure what that kind of service would look like or who would actually do the work to create it.