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.