Co-founder and CEO Victor Henning told me that the company’s API, which offers other services access to its trove of millions of scientific documents, has just surpassed 100 million calls each month. A year after launching the service — which provides access to the information stored in around 65 million scientific papers, documents and files in Mendeley’s databases — the site has around 240 apps that employ it, and is now seeing growth rocket. And that growth, he said, comes through the increasing popularity of those apps, not through any new, specific effort on its own part.

Henning highlighted a few of the projects which are creating the bulk of that traffic, including some interesting examples of the benefit opening up some data can have on what is, traditionally, quite a closed market.

For example, Readermeter.org and Total Impact are both services that measure how much impact a particular scientific paper or author has by analyzing how much and how widely the work is read. Meanwhile productivity app Hojoki integrates with Mendeley, pulling updates in alongside other services to create a personalized newsfeed for you.

Perhaps most interesting of all is OpenSNP, a project that allows people to share their genomic data with each other. It’s using Mendeley to help users cross reference the data they are finding out about their own genetic makeup with the latest scientific research as a way of understanding what’s going on in their bodies. If that’s not mind-blowing, I don’t know what is.

Henning says this is all part of a move to opening up science.

Next up? Wary of Twitter’s recent API troubles, Henning says that Mendeley wants to enable as many third party apps as possible, and has no plans to force money out of them — instead focusing on paid accounts and secondary services like its institutional dashboard.

“In academia, everything revolves around journals — but everything is behind a paywall, only available to universities who pay expensive subscriptions, and without APIs or other ways to access the data,” he said. “People see the importance of this [Mendeley's API] for opening up science.”

“We want to keep growing the ecosystem, get apps talking to each other and get more integration with the Mendeley experience” he adds. “But we don’t intend to monetize the apps.”

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But there’s one service that has quietly been making waves — and now it’s about to stage a real revolution.

London-based Mendeley doesn’t get a lot of press because it focuses on a very specific part of the market: the academic world. But it’s a big, valuable market worth billions of dollars each year, and one that’s ripe for disruption. And the site has become a big hit with academics and researchers, signing up nearly 2 million members from universities and institutions all over the world, because it allows them to keep tabs on all the research papers, documents and files.

Now, thanks to that popularity, the startup is rolling out its first big data product — and it’s a doozy.

Mendeley Institutional Edition, announced on Monday, is a new data dashboard that takes all of the activity on the site and presents it to universities as a way of gaining deeper insights into what their researchers are doing.

“The biggest problem in academia is the long waiting time: it can take three to five years from the time you have done research to get it published — all the decisions you make in an academic career are based around that time lag,” Victor Henning, Mendeley’s co-founder and CEO told me.

“We’ve developed a product that’s packaged into a data dashboard and allows universities to see what’s happening right now: what are the journals they’re reading? What are they not reading?”

It’s not just about optimizing efficiency by dropping unread journal subscriptions, or watching which areas are growing fast. The service can also let universities see the other side: which members of their faculty are publishing most? Who’s being cited? What areas are they active in? Those are things that institutions care deeply about — but struggle to find right now because most data out there is old data.

The system is built on the back of data that’s constantly streaming in from the service’s 1.8 million users. Between them, the site’s members have uploaded some 260 million documents, representing around 65 million unique research papers and studies — around 50 percent larger than any of the existing commercial databases. By mining those documents and watching activity around them, Mendeley’s able to help institutions understand the trends as they emerge… not years afterwards.

In fact, some universities see this effort as so vital that it’s already signed up its first seven partners, including the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. And plans on rolling out the product to more places soon, through a distribution partnership with Dutch library giant Swets.

“Our data is now helping some of the world’s best universities work more efficiently and get to life-changing discoveries faster,” said Henning. “My inner nerd is going: Wow, this is freaking amazing.”

There are a number of companies trying to work in this area, including social networks like ResearchGate and document management services like Digital Science. But the biggest players are academic publisher Reed Elsevier (see disclosure) which has been subject to a boycott over its profiteering tactics recently), and the information giant Thomson Reuters.

Thomson, specifically, publishes its Impact Factor — a rating of how well-received or well-cited a paper is. But that also suffers from a lag. In the end, Henning says, he’d like to replace that rating with one based on immediate, real-time data uncovered through Mendeley — something he thinks would be hard to compete with.

“The real incumbents who have the best chance of dominating this landscape are Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier,” he said. “But killing us is difficult because they’d have to replicate what we do. We’ve built up a big user base over the past three years and I think you really have to understand how to do that if you want to compete with us.”

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM

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