The rumour that Elsevier is buying Mendeley has been greeted with a mixture of horror, anger, peppered with a few congratulations, I told you so's, and touting for new customers: Here's some probably worthless speculation to add to the mix. Disclosure: I use Mendeley to manage 100,000's of references, and use the API for various projects.

Say what you will about Elsevier, they are certainly exploring ways to re-imagine the scientific article. In a comment on an earlier post Fabian Schreiber pointed out that Elsevier have released an app to display phylogenies in articles they publish. The app is based on jsPhyloSVGand is described here.

PLoS recently announced a dedicated iPad app, that covers all the PLoS Journals, and which is available from the App Store. Given the statement that "PLoS is committed to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific communication" I was expecting something special.

At long last the peer-reviewed version of the paper "Enhanced display of scientific articles using extended metadata" (doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.03.004), in which I describe my entry in the Elsevier Grand Challenge, has finally appeared in the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web . The pre-print version of this paper has been online (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3173.1) for a year prior to appearance of the

I learnt today that my Elsevier Challenge entry didn't make the final cut. This wasn't unexpected. In the interests of "open science" (blame Paulo Nuin) here is the feedback I received from the judges: I think this is a pretty fair evaluation of my entry. I was making a case for what could be done, rather than providing a specific bit of kit that could make this happen right now.

Stata Center. MIT Originally uploaded by Roderic Page Quick post about the Elsevier Challenge, which took place yesterday in the wonderful Stata Center at MIT. It was a great experience.

I've submitted my entry for the Elsevier Grand Challenge. The paper describing the entry is available from Nature Precedings (doi:10.1038/npre.2008.2579.1). The web site demo is at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/challenge/www/. I'm now officially knackered.

Elsevier have released this video about the challenge, featuring a few of the contestants. I couldn't get my act together in time to send anything useful, and having seen the 16 gigabytes song (full version here), I'm glad I didn't -- there's just no way I could compete with Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie.

Chris Freeland's tweet alterted me to the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest: Elsevier are clearly looking for ideas (they also have their Grand Challenge), and there's been some interesting commentary on the Article 2.0 contest.

Just to provide a sense of how much data I want to analyse for the Challenge, I have the XML, PDF, and images for 1687 articles from Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution to play with.