SciVee.tv
August 19, 2007
As someone with an ever increasing interest in podcasting and video, the recent announcement of SciVee.tv is very fascinating. It joins Bioscreencast and JoVE as the more interesting science related video sites on the web. (Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders of Bioscreencast.com). Today’s net savvy user is up to speed with podcasting, increasingly video podcasting. SciVee provides scientists, especially authors with a platform to essentially set up video podcasts, or as they call them, PubCasts, around a publication. The following diagram is from the SciVee About page
The FAQ for the site says
SciVee is about the free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science. To learn more about SciVee link to our About Page.
SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Please see our Partners page to learn more about them.
In addition to the heavyweights involved with the site, it is obvious that the community aspects of the site have been thought through. The challenge is going to be recording video. With personal publishing platforms like Kyte.tv the barrier to usage is quite low, and with the software that, for example, accompanied my new Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, capturing video is getting increasingly easy and high quality, even with a web cam. However high quality video production, with appropriate processing and editing is not that simple. My podcasts are a lot more work that my Kyte broadcasts. Video requires even more work to be polished. Regardless, video is the future and SciVee is a great addition to the potential publishing opportunities for scientists on the web, whether via preprint servers like Nature Precedings, podcasts or video platforms like the ones mentioned in this post. (Note: It looks like SciVee has been developed on PLoS’ Topaz platform)
The site has a number of channels for PLoS and as I write this the featured Pubcast is one by Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase-Like Superfamily. It’s essentially a narrated slideshow, not too different from SlideShare’s Slidecasting feature. The cool aspects are (a) a narrative and (b) the ability to select specific slides. A second PubCast on LOCATE, is more of a video podcast, again with a transcript (that is something we would love to add to Bioscreencast).
The site is not fully functional yet. The social networking aspects have still not been turned on, but will be made available when the site comes out of alpha.
Is SciVee going to be successful? We don’t know, but it is a well designed site and seems to hit the right buttons. If scientists are ready, SciVee is going to be work. Even if it doesn’t, it’s yet another step towards a new era of scientific information dissemination, one that goes beyond the triumvirate of peer-reviewed publication, conference presentation, and/or conference poster. It’s fascinating stuff and to those scared about change, I say take the lead. Publish videos and screencasts. We are the ones who can bring about change, cause no one else will.
Hat tip to Krish for reminding me to blog about SciVee
Technorati Tags: SciVee, Video Podcast, PubCast, Open Science
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Admin, Audio/Video, Innovation, Open Science, Publishing, Software & Internet
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13 Responses to “SciVee.tv”
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This is an interesting twist. Nature is mostly developing in house their new tools but maybe collaborating with start-ups would be an alternative way of building tools for publishers. The publishers provide the people (social graph) and content and the start-ups provide the tools.
Excellent — thanks for the overview. I’m getting increasingly interested in online tools for the modern scientist; added accessibility to videotools like these will hopefully result in a fresh supply of online lectures and more ‘alive’ information flow. And aside from that I’ve been considering the possibility of doing some videos myself.
[…] Monday, August 20th, 2007 in bbgm, Thoughts by Deepak Over at bbgm, I have a post about SciVee, a new service from the NSF, PLoS and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The new service allows scientists to publish video podcasts in support of published work. This is big on many fronts; the organizations involved alone validate everything we’ve believed in here at Bioscreencast, and slowly, video for scientific content and online communication around scientific works, whether published or user generated in our case is going to continue to grow. […]
@Pedro - Not to dissimilar from how the media world works online, where content delivery networks, publishing platforms and publishers have this interplay of who does what. Having good publishing platforms reduces the barrier so much. Nature can afford to take the route they have taken, but for others, it would be a great idea.
@hthth - You’re quite welcome. I’ve already have people call me to tell me how cool SciVee is. You should absolutely do video. As costs go down (you can get a decent High Def camera with a hard drive for < $600 now), the usage is only going to go up.
Hi Deepak - I was just going to make sure you’ve heard about SciVee and here’s a whole post about it. There is probably a whole new job role in summarizing the content of existing scientific papers into 8 minute video lectures. What a wonderful tool.
[…] I can’t summarise it any better than Deepak: “SciVee provides scientists, especially authors with a platform to essentially set up video podcasts, or as they call them, PubCasts, around a publication.” It’s built in partnership with PLoS, amongst others and provides channels for several PLoS journals. […]
Melanie, the potential for video in science is fascinating, which is one reason I am exploring video these days. What will be very interesting to watch is the comfort level of the community. I have a feeling we are going to see a lot of postdocs in these videos
[…] I’m a little late on this one, but I’d like to express my amazement by the way the great people at PLoS manage to disseminate scientific information. This time they’ve joined forces with a couple partners and put out what is now my favorite science video/screencast streaming website - SciVee (even though I’m pretty fond of bioscreencasts.com!). […]
[…] SciVee.tv (bbgm): Deepak has a nice review of this new service. […]
[…] - bbgm […]
let’s hope the quality of SciVee’s submissions improves. in the video department they are way behind JoVE, who has published it’s 7th issue already. funny that SciVee would have a category dedicated to neglected tropical diseases, when jove did an entire issue on malaria.
check i out http://www.jove.com
The quality of SciVee videos is probably never going to be as good as those on JoVE, where video quality is of prime importance. I don’t think too many scientists will ever be great videographers, although I think in time I hope they get more creative.
I don’t see the two as competitive either. There is some overlap, but in the end, I believe SciVee should be about the backstory, and JoVE about the experiments themselves. Different worlds, different quality requirements, similar audience, at least for web lab experiments.
Try also this site: http://www.dnatube.com . it has similar idea.
http://www.dnatube.com