First two hundred citations are free? - Richard Akerman

Someone mentioned fitting in the current workflow... that's an important point. Currently my writing/publishing workflow consists of free tools. Not sure what in that workflow would be worth paying a subscription for... Surely, looking up my H-index is fun, but my employer already payed for that, and I would not do that myself, nor ask my employer to do that. The freemium addon would have to be improve the workflow considerably... - Egon Willighagen

word processor integration (it's easy to compete w/ EndNote on price). [I paid for Mekentosj Papers even w/o this integration.] - Michael Kuhn

# of citations would not be up for pricing, but if we were to handle more bulky data that might represent an option, or if we were to have automagic functionality. - Ian Mulvany

Pay extra for PDF storage in the cloud? - Richard Akerman

I think people would pay for word processor/doc integration but you'd have to sell that at institutional level not the level of individual users because an awful lot of institutions have endnote site licenses so no reason for indivduals to shift to something they have to pay for. - Cameron Neylon

Agree with Neil - Sally Church

Can you bundle it with the institutional subscription? or as an added option? - Cameron Neylon

I agree with Cameron. My institution has a RefWorks site license (actually, all of Ontario has it) so if I were to pay for something just for me it would have to be *vastly* superior. I believe EndNoteWeb is bundled with Web of Science so that also gives many people that option as well. As for people not affiliated with an institution that has these subs, there are also a lot of really good free options like Zotero and CiteUlike. - John Dupuis

(cont'd) It's hard to imagine how much better Connotea would have to be before I would pay for it. - John Dupuis

agree with RA probably storage and then some of the more advanced analysis functions - but they'd have to really work well and be somewhat unique - Christina Pikas

If Connotea could, in addition to what it does now, store pdfs in the cloud and integrate with a range of word processors (esp Google Docs), I'd pay for it. I pay, let's see, $40/year for email (had the account since before there was Gmail) and $30/year for photoblog, so I'd certainly pay something in that range for Connotea. I have RefWorks available through work, but never use it -- too clunky, no bookmarklet. - Bill Hooker

i am struggling to see why pdf storage on the cloud is a plus. They are already on the cloud. Now if it could remember and aggregate my access rights that would be useful. That i might even pay for personally for the convenience - Cameron Neylon from fftogo

IMHO, steer away from business models that charge individual. Instead, I'd focus on advertising. Based on what the personal information they're providing you, you should have the perfect information to hook up advertisers with their customers. And of course, well-targeted advertising is a bonus (not a hindrance) to your users... - Andrew Su

I wouldn't mind paying for a decent search engine and recommendation engine. And by recommendation engine I don't mean only suggestion on the recently published papers, but also recommendation of key papers in particular small field I started to work on 10 minutes ago. Is it possible at all with user base/collected data Connotea has? - Pawel Szczesny

hi andrew, sadly display-advertising only won't work for the kind of investment needed to create something useful for a small user base, i.e. scientists. Other forms of partnership and advertising may offer a partial solution. - Ian Mulvany

Pawel, most of the kind of data needed to do the recommendation you would like is pretty available through pubmed, you jest need to be able to cram it all in memory, which I think is possible, though I've not tried yet. - Ian Mulvany

As Ian mentions, the numbers would never add up for advertising. IMO, any monetization would have to be done at the institutional level, and/or by providing a value add in the context of all of nature's services/publications. - Deepak Singh

I'm with Neil on this. You either accept that you're offering a branded product for free and people use it, and you hope that influence rubs off in subscriptions to your journals, or your subscribers desert you. - Daniel Swan

I'm inclined to agree with Ian that ads are a non-starter for this community. - Richard Akerman

I dunno, I still think ads are a viable model. I don't think scientists = small user base (when aggregated over all grad students and postdocs, biotech, pharma). And moreover, advertisers pay more for highly targeted advertising. And if a researcher has bookmarked a bunch of papers on molecular biology of Gene X, well maybe s/he is interested in molecular biology reagents around Gene X (oligos, antibodies, assays, etc.)... - Andrew Su

... if a researcher has bookmarked a bunch of papers on the latest molecular dynamics algorithms, well maybe s/he'd also be interested in the latest product offerings from comp chem software providers. etc etc... - Andrew Su

@Bill Hooker - RefWorks does have a bookmarklet, it's called ref grabit and it works pretty well - Christina Pikas

Andrew, to make $10K a month, Connotea would need at least 150-200K uniques a month. That's a tall order. If you aren't making that kind of money it's better not to make it ad supported IMO of course - Deepak Singh

Unless they were able to leverage the ad deals nature.com has, which is a different game. - Deepak Singh

@Christina: thanks, I didn't know that. I'd play with it more, but it (my RefWorks access) goes away when this job goes away, and I want something a bit more permanent than that. - Bill Hooker

okay, I admit I'm talking in principle here rather than based on firm numbers. But where does one find firm numbers on typical online ad rates? Specifically, I'd be interested in seeing click-through rates, since that's where having a very targeted audience pays off... Random guesses: if $0.01/impression, then $1/click-through? - Andrew Su

The Nature brand is key here. Most institutions subscribe to one or more NPG journals, and all to Nature. How about a bundle to add-in Connotea? Or offer discounts on certain journals if Connotea subscription is bought? You could also think about a way to make Connotea part of the submission process to NPG journals. Overall, we, scientists in academy are cheap, we pay only for things that help us publish. Digg around this. - Mounir Errami