I discussed Mendeley when it first launched and I perceived it as a kind of “Napster for Research Papers”, although more accurately you might think of it as “iTunes in the Cloud for PDFs”. Anyway, I’ve accumulated quite a few PDFs during my 20+ years as a science writer. I’m gradually adding papers to my Mendeley account, which will add to their meta-database.
I’ve uploaded about 1000 PDFs so far, I’m sure there’ll be some errant formats, but seems to be fine so far. They’re all searchable and if they happen to be in Open Access journals you’ll be able to read the full paper, otherwise it will be just the abstract and meta data. Unless of course you have access to the journals via your library or IP address subscription.
Meanwhile, I now need to dig out my backup drives and search and select more PDFs from my archives.
Sciencebase on Mendeley.