Two years ago when I was first introduced to Mendeley I concluded that if they executed right they could "change the face of science". Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Turn the clock forward two years and Mendeley has now evolved into the world's largest crowdsourced research database, with 70 million documents, usage statistics and reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations. This database is available under a creative commons license.

To see what innovation can happen when this data is freely available Mendeley has issued a challenge dubbed "The Mendeley API Binary Battle" - build an application that mashes up the Mendeley data and you can win $10,001! Details about the Mendeley APIs and the competition can be found at the Mendeley developer site.

I am on the jury for this contest and I am really looking forward to seeing some cool innovation with this data. I am sure there will be some data analysis applications that will look for patterns in this data and if you need some support to run this data analysis on AWS (and maybe get some free usage hours) you should contact Matt Wood.