Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: Mendeley

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Perhaps the key difference between Mendeley and the other apps is that Mendeley is cloud-based, in that the bibliography exists on Mendeley's servers, as well as locally on your desktop, iPad, or iPhone. Hence, whereas the Nature and PLoS apps consume a web stream of documents, and Papers enables you to sync collections between desktop and iOS devices, Mendeley syncs to central web server. At present this appears to be done over HTTPS. Mendeley recently released an API, which I've discussed at length. Mendeley's app doesn't use this API, which is a pity because if it did I suspect the API would be getting the love it needs from Mendeley's developers.

Like Papers, the Mendley app uses a split view, where the left-hand panel is used for navigation.

You can drill down to lists of references, and display basic details about an article.

PDF
The Mendeley app is a PDF viewer, but whereas the PLoS app has page turning, and the Papers app scrolls pages from left to right, the Mendeley app displays PDF pages vertically (which is probably the more natural way to scroll through content on the iPad):

Summary
It's clearly early days for the Mendeley app, but it's worth noting two of its most obvious limitations. Firstly, it depends entirely on the user's existing Mendeley bibliography - you can't add to this using the app, it's simply a viewer. Compare this to Papers which can access a suite of search engines from which you can download new papers (albeit with some limitations, for example the Papers iPad app doesn't seem to support extracting metadata via XMP, unlike the desktop version). Secondly, despite Mendeley having as one of its goals being a

research network that allows you to keep track of your colleagues' publications, conference participations, awards etc., and helps you discover people with research interests similar to yours

the Mendeley app lacks any social features, apart from sharing by email(!). I think designing social interactions in bibliographic apps will be a challenge. For an example of what social reading can look like, check out Flipboard.

Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: Papers

Continuing the series of posts about reading scientific articles on the iPad, here are some quick notes on perhaps the most polished app I've seen, Papers for iPad. As with earlier posts on the Nature and PLoS apps, I'm not writing an in-depth review - rather I'm interested in the basic interface design.

Papers is available for the Mac, as well as the iPhone and iPad. Unlike social bibliographic apps such as Zotero and Mendeley, Papers lacks a web client. Instead, all your PDFs are held on your Mac, which can be wirelessly synced with Papers on the iPad or iPhone.

Navigation popover

Papers makes extensive of use of the split view, in which the screen is split into two panes, the left-hand split becoming a popover when you hold the iPad in porrtait orientation. Almost all of the functionality of the iPhone version is crammed into the left-hand split. The popover displays the main interface categories (library, help, collections that you've put PDFs into), collections of documents, metadata for individual papers (which you can edit), as well as search results from a wide range of databases:

Some of these features you encounter as you drill down, say from library to list of papers, to details about a document, others you can access by clicking on the tab bar at the bottom.

PDF display
Like the PLoS app, Papers displays PDFs. It doesn't use a page-turning effect, rather you swipe through the pages from left to right, with the current page indicated below in a page control (what Sencha Touch describe as a carousel control).

Given that the document being displayed is a PDF there is no interaction with the images or citations, but you can add highlights and annotations.

Summary
Papers is the first of the iPad apps I've discussed that isn't limited to a single publisher. If and article is online, or in your copy of Papers for the Mac, then you can view it in Papers for iPad. It is the app that I use on a day to day basis, although the PDF viewer can feel a little clunky. I think anyone designing an application reader should play with Papers for a while, if only to see the level of functionality that can be embedded in the basic iPad split view.

On being open: Mendeley and open data versus open source

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote:

After extensively researching some material online, analysing many blog posts and statements made by people linked to Mendeley, checking my sources, I reached the conclusion that soon Mendeley is going to be open source.

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:

I get asked a lot about open sourcing Mendeley when I go to speaking events. I always state that we are open to the possibility, but then ask how many people know how to type a URL verus how many know how to program in C++? That’s why we went with the Open API first instead of open sourcing the desktop software. If you can type a URL, which is what the API is based upon, then you can build on top of Mendeley. You don’t need to know how to program.

Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I think Jason is right. I also think Paulo's campaign to make Mendeley open source is misguided. The client doesn't matter. OK, yes, it's probably the reason most people use Mendeley, but there are lots of competing clients (EndNote, Zotero, Papers, etc.), and there are several bibliographic data formats (RIS, EndNote XML, BibTeX) and essentially one document format (PDF) that they support, so individual users don't have to worry about locking their individual bibliographies into a proprietary format. Couple this with the existence of an API (albeit a pretty crap one), and whether an individual software client is closed or open source doesn't matter much.

Will the data be open?

However, what makes Mendeley different is the aggregation of bibliographic data (35 million references and counting).

I'd argue it's the fate of this aggregation that matters. In a comment on the Guardian's piece Mendeley 'most likely to change the world for the better', Jane Good wrote:

"World-changing potential"? This utopian fantasy stuff is a little much, no? After all, we're talking about a for-profit corporation using closed-source software to monitor private usage habits for monetary gain. And how exactly is this company meant to sustain its millions of dollars of annual burn on a few measly storage subscriptions? At some point the data will have to go up for sale to the highest bidder, plain and simple. The API, as it exists now, does not provide access to that data, and it probably never will, right, DrGinn[sic]?

Toning down the rhetoric, the question is Mendeley, Scopus, Talis – will you be making your data Open?:

But how can a company create an income stream from Open Scientific content? That’s the a question for me for this decade. If we can solve it we can transform the world. If however the linked Open data are all going to be through paywalls, portals, query engines then we regress into the feudal information possession of the past. I hope the companies present in this session can help solve this. It won’t be easy but it has to be done. So I now ask Mendeley, Elsevier/Scopus, Talis: Are your data Openly available for re-use?

For me the question of whether the source code for the Mendeley desktop will be made open source is a red herring, and ultimately a distraction from the real question — will the data be open?