Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote:Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied:Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I think

This week seems to be API week. The Encyclopedia of Life API Beta Test has been out since August 12th.

Following on from my earlier post about the Mendeley API, I've bundled up my code for OAuth access to the Mendeley API for anyone who's interested in playing with the API using PHP. You can browse the code on Google Code, or grab a tarball here.

Every so often I revisit the idea of browsing a collection of documents (or specimens, or phylogenies) geographically.

Continuing on from my previous post Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: towards a universal article reader, here are some brief notes on the PLoS iPad app that I've previously been critical of.There are two key things to note about this app. The first is that it uses the page turning metaphor. The article is displayed as a PDF, a page at a time, and the user swipes the page to turn it over.

TreeView X, the open source version of TreeView, has been slowly suffering bit rot as C++ compilers and operating systems change. Every so often I'd tweak the code to build on some Linux version or other, but this isn't something I've a lot of time for. Moreover, because of the hassle of rebuilding binaries and source tar balls the updated versions weren't uploaded to the TreeView X web site.

There are a growing number of applications for viewing scientific articles coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I'm toying with extending the experiments described in an earlier post when I took the PLoS iPad app to task for being essentially a PDF page-turner, so I thought I should take a more detailed look at the currently available apps.

After playing with the public API for Mendeley over the weekend (see Social citations: using Mendeley API to measure citation readership) I've had a quick play with the user specific part of the API.

Quick note on an app I threw together using the Mendeley API that I discussed in the previous post. This app is crude, and given that the Mendeley API is rate-limited and in flux it might not work for you.The basic idea is to embellish make the list of literature cited in an article with information that might help a reader decide whether a given citation is worth reading. One clue might be how many people on Mendeley are reading that article.

Menedeley's API has been publicly launched at http://dev.mendeley.com/, accompanied by various announcements such as:All good fun to be sure, but it's a pity more effort has been spent on Easter eggs than on documenting and testing the API. If you visit the API development site there's precious little in the way of documentation, and few examples.

I've just come back from a holiday in New Zealand, during which time I spent a morning chatting with Zhi-Qiang Zhang (@Zootaxa, editor of Zootaxa ) and Stephen Thorpe (stho002, a major contributor to Wikispecies).Fresh from playing with PLoS XML to explore ways of redisplaying articles (described in my commentary on the PLoS iPad app), I was extolling the virtues of the XML mark-up that underlies PLoS (and other Open Access journals, such