Mendeley, “the Last.fm of research”, has rolled out new premium packages after customers requested features such as more storage and expressed a willingness to pay. If only to see the longevity of the London-based startup.
Mendeley offers a secure online database for scientists, academics and researchers to store their research papers in the ‘cloud’, making it easier to share those documents with peers. The system also helps researchers find and connect to like-minded academics in similar fields by looking at and extracting relevant meta-data from the millions of research papers stored in its database.
While the basic version of Mendeley remains free – re-badged the “Earth” plan and providing 1GB of combined ‘personal’ and ‘shared’ storage – for those needing to house and collaborate on a greater number of research documents, three paid-for plans are now available. Users can upgrade to “Solar System” ($4.99/€4.99 month), which features 3.5GB of personal and 3.5GB of shared storage, or “Milky Way” ($9.99/€9.99 month) giving 7.5GB of each. And if that’s not enough, customers can get in touch about custom “Big Bang” plans.
Victor Henning, Co-Founder and CEO of Mendeley says that prior to today’s introduction of premium packages, the London-based startup had already “upgraded hundreds of researchers and labs” who had asked for more storage space or larger collaboration sizes.
He also says that the roll out of paid-for plans are likely to be well received by many of Mendeley’s 375,000 users who have entrusted the company with their research data – 26.5 million documents – and changed their work-flow accordingly.
“They wanted to make sure that we had a sustainable business model and were still around in five years”, says Henning.