Mendeley handles 100 million calls monthly from external apps

The number of queries to the Mendeley database (termed “API calls”) from external applications now exceeds 100 million per month.

The queries come from more than 240 applications for research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup, and discovery that have been developed in the past year.

Mendeley’s shared database containing 65 million unique documents and covers - according to recent studies - 97.2 to 99.5 per cent of all research articles published, says the company.

The most popular apps built on Mendeley’s platform fulfil academia’s need for faster and more granular metrics of scientific impact. ReaderMeter.org and Total-Impact.org display a researcher’s or a labs’ real-time impact on the academic community. Hojoki pulls updates from Mendeley and other productivity tools like Evernote and Basecamp into a common newsfeed. Kleenk allows users to create free-form semantic links between documents in their Mendeley library and share them publicly. OpenSNP, winner of Mendeley’s $10,001 Binary Battle prize, makes the connection between raw genetic data and published research.

Victor Henning, CEO & co-founder of Mendeley, said: ‘Our vision was always to make science more open. The Mendeley API liberates data that has been locked behind paywalls for decades - enabling app developers to reinvent academic workflows, research data discovery, even scientific publishing. Max Planck said: “Science progresses funeral by funeral”. I think we’ve found a better method.’