Bryan Drew and colleagues have published a piece in PLoS Biology bemoaning the lack of databased phylogenies: This is an old problem (see for example "Towards a Taxonomically Intelligent Phylogenetic Database" doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1028.1), but alas the solution proposed by Drew et al. is also old: In my opinion, as soon as you start demanding people do something you've lost the argument, and you're relying on power ("you don't get to publish

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.

Here are some quick notes on how BHL could use Mendeley as a "CiteBank". As a repository of bibliographic data If the goal is to assemble a "bibliography of life" then there are various ways this could be done. Taxon-specific bibliographies Create groups that are taxon-specific (or find existing groups in Mendeley.

The latest addition to my mapping of taxonomic names to the literature (http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon/) is the ability for authors with Mendeley accounts to find the names they've published. This is an extension of the "I wrote that" tool I developed earlier. Let's say I want to show the names that a given author has published.

Browsing Mendeley I found the following record: http://www.mendeley.com/research/description-larva/. This URL is for a paper which apparently has the DOI doi:10.1645/GE-2580.1. This is strange because Zootaxa doesn't have DOIs. The DOI given resolves to a paper in the Journal of Parasitology : Now, this paper has it's own record in Mendeley. OK, so this is weird..., but it gets weirder.

I'm taking a virtual part in Mendeley's Hack4Knowledge event. I'm using this a chance to explore some ideas about building novel interfaces to bibliographic data in Mendeley. One idea is to display a user's entire library in one screen. I think the user interfaces employed by most bibliographic software are too conservative and there some cool things that could be done.

Quick, poorly thought out idea. I've argued before that Mendeley seems the obvious tool to build a "bibliography of life." It has pretty much all the features we need: nice editing tools, support for DOIs, PubMed identifiers, social networking, etc. But there's one thing it lacks. There's not an easy way to transmit updates from Mendeley to another database.

Now we'll bring the awesome. Mendeley have announced The Mendeley API Binary Battle, with a first prize of $US 10,0001, and some very high-profile judges (Juan Enriquez, Tim O'Reilly, James Powell, Werner Vogels, and John Wilbanks). Deadline for submission is August 31st 2011, with the results announced in October. The criterion for judging are: How active is your application? We’ll look at your API key usage. How viral is the app?

Mendeley has added a feature which makes it easier to use Mendeley with repositories such as BioStor and BHL.

One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears to be due to some over-zealous attempts to de-duplicate documents.