Mendeley Funding:
Securing a Sponsor for Your Research Just Got Easier
To do research you need money and irrespective of the amount
needed or the subject area, funding opportunities must be considered. Finding
the right research funding for your project is in itself a lot of work.
Recently, Mendeley, the reference manager launched a new online tool, called
Mendeley Funding. It aims to help researchers easily and quickly find the right
funding opportunities for them in one place. The goal is to offer both an
accurate research funding service in a one-of-kind catalog, with many benefits.
Nowadays, the pressure and
competition to get research funding has never been greater and there is a lot
to choose. Although more people are looking for money, there is no shortage of
funds. Compared to 2015, there was a 3.4% increase in research funding spent in
2016 (1.9 trillion USD). Mendeley apparently understands this and by launching
Mendeley Funding, it wants to help researchers launch their own projects.
Using
Mendeley Funding
This tool is a type of
aggregator. It searches and compiles information on funding opportunities.
These typically are scientific grants to academic persons or groups. It also
includes award-type funds to individuals, including PhD students and post-docs
thus making it a funding catalog. The key is its global scope: Mendeley Funding
takes information from more than 2000 prominent organizations on their call for
proposals. These will not only include major government research funding
agencies (think NIH in the USA, NSERC in Canada, European Union [EU], to name a
few) but also non-government funders (think philanthropy foundations,
societies, etc.).
To try it, you must access the
tool through the
website. Here, you must first sign in. Once you have logged in, look in the
toolbar for “Funding”. Click on it and this brings you into Mendeley Funding.
To get started you can choose either the “Find opportunities” or the “Browse
funders”. Through both, you can find the right match for your research project,
with speed and ease. You can also view funding opportunities currently
available by their type, or even see the funder’s history.
Benefits
of Using Mendeley Funding
Even if you don’t like the
Mendeley reference manager, Mendeley Funding is worth a look. This is because
of what it offers researchers. First, it is free to access and use. Just set up
an account. For researchers in less wealthy countries, this is great.
Second, the tool has a
timeliness factor, as the catalog is always updated in real time. Therefore,
you won’t miss the relevant funding opportunities. Third, you can easily save
those funding opportunities that only interest you, all in one place. Fourth,
you get to see detailed information about the potential funders. Mendeley
Funding wisely lets each funder have its own page for easy viewing.
Potential
Impact
Mendeley Funding is a promising
tool that many researchers will surely find useful. By providing a funding
repository, the scientific community can save much time and presumably do
better science. This should have knock-on effects across universities and may
improve or worsen the strain on peer-review. On one hand, by finding the right
opportunity for research funding, a better match means fewer yet more targeted
proposals. Conversely, some may use the tool to cast their net wider. If so,
this could flood funders with more proposals to consider. Finding even more
unbiased reviewers for these will be difficult.
The bigger business picture
also cannot be ignored. Three “tech-savvy scholars” founded Mendeley as
software start up almost 9 years ago. It received several awards and many
scientists embraced it because it championed Open Access. The impact of its
reference manager and file-sharing academic network was substantial, with
millions of registered users. So much so, that in 2013 the scholarly publishing
giant, Elsevier, acquired it. This was perhaps to protect copyrighted PDF
publications in scientific journals.
Mendeley Funding is built on
the Mendeley reference manager and its associated social network. Presumably,
people who like Mendeley Funding are more likely to dabble and try the Mendeley
reference software. More users and their searches—e.g., who’s reading what—will
generate valuable information for Elsevier to promote its publishing business
model. Optimistically, more users will enable the scientific community to share
and comment on each other’s work and on research funding and to better
collaborate. Will Mendeley Funding do something good and fantastic for science?
It very well may. We will have to wait and see.
Source
| https://www.enago.com/academy/mendeley-funding-finding-funding-for-your-research-just-got-easier/
Regards!
Librarian
Rizvi Institute of Management
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