BioStor article published (finally)

My article describing BioStor — "Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library" — has finally seen the light of day in BMC Bioinformatics (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-187, the DOI is not working at the moment, give it a little while to go live, meantime you can access the article here).

Getting this article published was more work than I expected. There seems to be an inverse correlation between how important I think the work is and how easy it is to get published — the more straightforward I think the article is the more work it is to convince the referees of its merits. Of course, it may be that my judgement of the article's merits influences how much effort I put into making the manuscript as rigorous and clear as possible. And perhaps having a blog has spoiled me, I really struggle with the notion that it takes months to publish a paper, especially as most of the intellectual debate involved (i.e., the refereeing process) is behind closed doors, compared to the open and immediate nature of commentary on a blog post.

However, despite my frustrations with the referring process, there's no doubt that it did improve the manuscript (you can see the original version at Nature Precedings, hdl:10101/npre.2010.4928.1).

With the publication of this article, and last week's conversation with Anurag Acharya and Darcy Dapra about getting BioStor indexed by Google Scholar, it has been a good few days for BioStor.

Google Scholar metadata quality and Mendeley hype

Hot on the heels of Geoffrey Nunberg's essay about the train wreck that is Google books metadata (see my earlier post) comes Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems by Péter Jacsó. It's a fairly scathing look at some of the problems with the quality of Google Scholar's metadata.

Now, Google Scholar isn't perfect, but it's come to play a key role in a variety of bibliographic tools, such as Mendeley, and Papers. These tools do a delicate dance with Google Scholar who, strictly speaking, don't want anybody scraping their content. There's no API, so Mendeley, Papers (and my own iSpecies) have to keep up with the HTML tweaks that Google introduces, pretend to be web browsers, fuss with cookies, and try to keep the rate of queries below the level at which the Google monster stirs and slaps them down.

Jacsó's critique also misses the main point. Why do we have free (albeit closed) tools like Google Scholar in the first place? It's largely because scientists have ceeded the field of citation analysis to commercial companies, such as Elsevier and Thompson Reuters. To echo Martin Kalfatovic's comment:

Over the years, we've (librarians and the user community) have allowed an important class of metadata - specifically the article level metadata - migrate to for profit entities.

Some visionaries, such as Robert Cameron in his A Universal Citation Database as a Catalyst for Reform in Scholarly Communication, argued for free, open citation databases, but this came to nought.

For me, this is the one thing the ridiculously over-hyped Mendeley could do that would merit the degree of media attention it is getting -- be the basis of an open citation database. It would need massive improvement to its metadata extraction algorithms, which currently suck (Google Scholar's, for all Jacsó's complaints, are much better), but it would generate something of lasting value.