Blogs about Science

The successful candidate will conduct research on the neurobiology of spontaneous behavior and operant learning using Drosophila as a neurogenetic model organism. Methods will include computer-controlled behavioral experiments with wildtype, mutant and transgenic flies, neuroanatomy using standard and confocal microscopy as well as some molecular biology such as qPCR to determine the effectiveness of RNAi-mediated gene knock-down. The successful candidate will have a PhD in any relevant field, experience in Drosophila biology, at least some coding experience, preferably in R, MatLab, Python or similar languages and be enthusiastic about working in an open science lab. The position is a university-paid, fixed-term position along the funding scale outlined by the TVöD EG13, approx. 2000€ after tax (more for senior postdocs) and including all medical and social benefits, including a pension fund.

The successful candidate will conduct research on the neurobiology of spontaneous behavior and operant learning using Drosophila as a neurogenetic model organism. Methods will include computer-controlled behavioral experiments with wildtype, mutant and transgenic flies, neuroanatomy using standard and confocal microscopy as well as some molecular biology such as qPCR to determine the effectiveness of RNAi-mediated gene knock-down. The successful candidate will have a PhD in any relevant field, experience in Drosophila biology, at least some coding experience, preferably in R, MatLab, Python or similar languages and be enthusiastic about working in an open science lab. The position is a university-paid, fixed-term position along the funding scale outlined by the TVöD EG13, approx. 2000€ after tax (more for senior postdocs) and including all medical and social benefits, including a retirement plan. Starting date for the position is October 1, 2013 and applications before July 1, 2013...

Here on Obesity Panacea we regularly discuss obesity-related research.  If you are interested, today you have the opportunity to give back by responding to 2 online research studies about obesity-related issues. The first survey, available here, is aimed at …

Academia has a reputation for being a bit of a closed world, a walled garden of knowledge where secrets are jealously guarded. But the truth is that collaboration is at the very heart of research and scientific discovery, and that for science to advance, researchers need to get together, compare notes, disagree, and have their [...]

There have been a lot of electrons spilled over the Elsevier Acquisition of Mendeley. I don’t intend to add too much to that discussion but it has provoked for me an interesting train of thought which seems worth thinking through. For what its worth my views of the acquisition are not too dissimilar to those of Jason Hoyt and John Wilbanks, and I recommend their posts. I have no doubt that the Mendeley team remain focussed on their vision and I hope they do well with it. And even with ...

There is a flood of commentary covering the sale of Mendeley to Elsevieer. However, only a few posts have bemoaned the sale of Mendeley's usage data to Elsevier. So perhaps now is a good time to speculate a little, what Elsevier might be up to with this new asset. In particular, a speculation with their past track record in mind. Obviously, given that Mendeley can be used to share copyrighted content, Elsevier could go and sue Mendeley users for breach of copyright. Elsevier and other corporate publishers have a long track record of suing their customers, so this would not be unexpected at all, on the contrary - we should be positively surprised if Elsevier would not use this data to enforce their copyrights, one way or another. Another commonly observed behavior would be to use the data to develop a very useful tool and initially offering it for free. So far, so good, this would actually be a positive and welcomed consequence. However, more likely is probably the scenario where...

There is a flood of commentary covering the sale of Mendeley to Elsevieer. However, only a few posts have bemoaned the sale of Mendeley's usage data to Elsevier. So perhaps now is a good time to speculate a little, what Elsevier might be up to with this new asset. In particular, a speculation with their past track record in mind. Obviously, given that Mendeley can be used to share copyrighted content, Elsevier could go and sue Mendeley users for breach of copyright. Elsevier and other corporate publishers have a long track record of suing their customers, so this would not be unexpected at all, on the contrary - we should be positively surprised if Elsevier would not use this data to enforce their copyrights, one way or another. Another commonly observed behavior would be to use the data to develop a very useful tool and initially offering it for free. So far, so good, this would actually be a positive and welcomed consequence. However, more likely is probably the scenario where...

We wanted to let you know that we’ve made some changes to give our user community a better Mendeley experience. From now on all personal and Mendeley Institutional Edition accounts (apart from the ones that already have unlimited storage) will get a lot more personal library space for storing documents. Here’s how it works: [...]

Today’s guest post comes from Dr Jameson Voss.  You can find more on Jameson at the bottom of this post.  You can find out how to submit your own Obesity Panacea guest post here. Obesity is a complex and …

The recent acquisition of popular reference manager Mendeley (I'm a Mendeley user myself) apparently only was a consequential step for publishing giant Elsevier, according to Mendeley insider Jason Hoyt. Anyway, the price-tag of 100m US$ (or less) pocket change for a firm that rakes in a billion in profits every year. Jason tells us that from the very beginning, Mendeley's open API as well as some other open discovery functionality was a thorn in the side of toll-access corporation Elsevier. Apparently, the giant made sure their 36% profit margin wasn't threatened by bullying Mendeley into rolling back some of their functionality. In the wake of the Elsevier boycott movement, the corporation apparently changed course and decided to buy the start-up instead. What we see now appears to be a company (Elsevier) that is largely and rightfully villified in the scholarly community trying to use (inter alii) a popular community tool to turn the tide of of bad PR. Given the track record of...

The recent acquisition of popular reference manager Mendeley (I'm a Mendeley user myself) apparently only was a consequential step for publishing giant Elsevier, according to Mendeley insider Jason Hoyt. Anyway, the price-tag of 100m US$ (or less) pocket change for a firm that rakes in a billion in profits every year. Jason tells us that from the very beginning, Mendeley's open API as well as some other open discovery functionality was a thorn in the side of toll-access corporation Elsevier. Apparently, the giant made sure their 36% profit margin wasn't threatened by bullying Mendeley into rolling back some of their functionality. In the wake of the Elsevier boycott movement, the corporation apparently changed course and decided to buy the start-up instead. What we see now appears to be a company (Elsevier) that is largely and rightfully villified in the scholarly community trying to use (inter alii) a popular community tool to turn the tide of of bad PR. Given the track record of...

Today we are excited to announce that Mendeley is joining Elsevier! You might already have heard some rumors and speculation about this in the past few weeks. We hope you’ll understand that we couldn’t address the rumors head-on until there was some actual news to share with you. Now that the union is official, we [...]

Will Mendeley still be free? Yes! There will always be a free version of Mendeley. Will Mendeley continue to develop new features? Yes – we will even become faster, as having access to Elsevier’s resources, partnerships, and reach in the academic, librarian, and professional R&D community will allow us to accelerate our development. Please head [...]

This time around, we have a friendly chat with our VP Finance & Operations David Lee, who’s been with us here at Mendeley for just under a year, before which he worked for the likes of EMI and Betfair. What made you apply for a job at Mendeley? Mendeley ticked all the criteria I was [...]

Academics in physics, economics, or math often think that life scientists (like myself) are weird because life science doesn't have a preprint server. Life science is a fast-paced discipline, but there's no place where the latest research can be found, discussed, and where the primacy of results can be established. There's a lot of value in life science research (the reproducible subset, that is) but instead of staking your claim to a finding shortly after you get the data, many researchers feel like they have to write a polished paper, submit it to a prestigious journal, and wait nerve-wracking months to years for the process of review, rejection, resubmission to finally make their results available to a subset of others in their field.As submission-to-publication times grow, fears of someone else getting there first grow and there are often accusations of "anonymous" reviewers asking for more experiments, just to delay the publication of a paper from a competing lab. What can be...

A little while back we sent out a survey to a few of our users asking for their stories about how Mendeley had helped them in their research, and we got quite a few responses from our community. What we also found out is that now that we’ve been around for a while – actually, [...]

Everyone is using Twitter these days. It's a great way to communicate and keep up to date with your social network of friends and interests. Therefore, we thought you'd be interested in being able to hook up your Mendeley and Twitter account so that folks can keep up with your research interests and output.

This week we ask some questions of our bubbly Office Manager Carole, who is responsible for keeping things looking lovely and working smoothly here at Mendeley HQ.  When you started working here, were things like you expected? They were exactly like I imagined, really laid back and really interesting people all passionate about the [...]

Actical accelerometer users rejoice! Rachel Colley of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute has posted annotated SAS files to use for cleaning and combining accelerometry data from multiple participants. The …

This week in our series of blogs about Team Mendeley we find out a bit more about our Lead Interaction Designer/iOS Product Manager Steve Dennis. When Mendeley was looking to expand its design team 3 years ago, our founders Victor Henning and Paul Föckler  approached Steve, who had moved to the UK from New Zealand [...]

Everyone is losing their marbles over a new study that suggests money incentives help folks lose weight. As Yoni Freedhoff accurately pointed out, the media attention seems a bit excessive for a non-peer reviewed abstract presented at a …

Back in 2006, Moshe Pritsker thought to use video technology to capture and transmit the intricacies of life science research, facilitating both the understanding and reproduction of experiments and techniques. This idea of “letting scientists look over each other’s shoulders” led to the launch of JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which is peer reviewed [...]