The music radio site Last.fm is one of the great ideas from the UK during the first dotcom boom. Users can listen to their own songs and other tracks recommended by Last.fm's algorithms based on their tastes, including iTunes, and those of friends. It could easily have been a one-trick pony. But now a few academics have applied its serendipity to scientific research. Why can't researchers, instead of waiting anywhere up to three years for their papers to jump all the hurdles, be part of a real-time market place – a fusion of iTunes and Last.fm for science? They pitched the idea, among others, to two of Last.fm's investors: Spencer Hyman and Stefan Glaenzer, newly enriched by the sale of Last.fm to CBS. They bought into the idea of using the site's principles to aggregate users' data (anonymously) while building up a databank of articles. Now the show is on the road and expanding fast. It is free, but a premium version will be added soon.

How does it work? At the basic level, students can "drag and drop" research papers into the site at mendeley.com, which automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, thereby creating a searchable database and saving countless hours of work. That in itself is great, but now the Last.fm bit kicks in, enabling users to collaborate with researchers around the world, whose existence they might not know about until Mendeley's algorithms find, say, that they are the most-read person in Japan in their niche specialism. You can recommend other people's papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can't do in Nature and Science. Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of "real-time" citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth. There are lots of research archives. For the physical (but not biological) sciences there is ArXiv, with more than half a million e-papers free online – but nothing on the potential scale of Mendeley. Around 60,000 people have already signed up and a staggering 4m scientific papers have been uploaded, doubling every 10 weeks. At this rate it will soon overtake the biggest academic databases, which have around 20m papers.

This startup is fascinating for a few reasons. First, it shows the second phase of the dotcom boom is throwing up great, practical ideas. Second, the technology transfer involved – from music to science – is innovative and raises the question of how many other disciplines could adopt it. Could there be a rival for Google by gearing search not to links to a website, but to the thinking of like-minded people? Third, this is another example of "Wimbledonisation", (a reference to the tennis tournament) in which Britain may not win the competition but gets the economic benefits of hosting the tournament. Mendeley, though based in Clerkenwell in central London, was founded by three German academics – Jan Reichelt and Victor Henning (interviewed here) and Paul Foeckler – confirming London's dominant position for European entrepreneurs as well as footballers. Investors told them it was the centre of the best research hub outside Boston and a magnet for recruitment. When I heard their five-minute pitch in a noisy room recently I hadn't realised how fast they were moving nor that they were about to be named one of the top 10 in Tech Media Invest 100, sponsored by the Guardian.

Small wonder that it has already got some of the world's leading universities on board, including Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Imperial, all by word of mouth. Dr Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of Amazon, reportedly said of Mendeley that if they got it right they could change the face of science. They seem to be well on the way.

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