Last week, Mendeley, an academic and scientific research cross-platform management tool, announced the availability of its Open API and access to academic data not available to developers before. In the announcement, Mendeley said the Open API can be used by third-party developers to create their own mashups, however, the API will not be made 100% available to everyone just yet. For now, the London-based company is accepting proposals from developers (who wish to have early access to the information) about what they envision building. The call for proposals is open now until Friday, May 14 and selected developers will be notified of their acceptance between now and May 21.

The Open API is Mendeley's way of responding to feature requests that are hard to keep up with or implement all together. Additionally, the company saw this as a solution for researchers that require niche-specific tools that are not suitable for inclusion in a general-purpose tool such as Mendeley, according to the announcement. This Open API will grant access to both aggregated statistics and a library for the developer.

For more information about submitting a proposal, check out this page.