Mendeley, a free reference manager that helps researchers organize and discover research articles, has announced a prize of $10,001 for the best new open source application to use with their large crowd-sourced open database of research papers.

Mendeley, whose database includes 70 million documents, allows researchers to import papers, generate bibliographies, track and tag documents, view usage statistics, and find and read papers from anywhere.

Mendeley has launched the contest because they want to “make science more open,” and to support a “world in which science is mashed up… with anything.”

Judges of the “Mendeley API Binary Battle” include Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, John Wilbanks of Creative Commons, and Werner Vogels, CTO of amazon.com.