PLoS and Partners Offer Video Communications With SciVee

by Paula J. Hane


With online video the hottest content on the Web these days, it is a logical progression to see it move beyond popular entertainment into more serious efforts-instruction, conference presentations, video journals, and scholarly research explanations. The scientific community
in particular seems to be embracing the new medium to enhance the dissemination and comprehension of science. SciVee (http://www.scivee.tv/) is a new site that lets scientists communicate their works as multimedia presentations incorporated with the content of their published articles.
SciVee is operated in partnership with the open access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The so-called "YouTube for science" site has already garnered a great deal of interest and buzz in the blogosphere and media, even though it is still in "alpha" stage and its founders weren't planning for a launch at this time.

According to one founder, Philip Bourne of the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) and founding editor in chief of PLoS Computational Biology, he talked about the project at a scientific
meeting and the buzz began prematurely. "The good news," he said, "is that more than 44,000 people have already looked at the site in the last few days; the bad news is that there's not enough content yet." (There look to be five pubcasts currently available.) The site is approaching 6 million hits and is drawing interest worldwide. The beta release is planned for September, and already some 700 people have volunteered to be beta testers.

The project began with some pilot pubcasts done at UCSD to test video formats and has involved the other PLoS editors. There are currently eight people on the SciVee team. The SDSC is providing the site hosting.

Bourne said that SciVee makes it easier and faster to keep up with current scientific literature because it can deliver the key points of articles in an enjoyable way-and one to which younger audiences in particular can relate. "I think it's a natural evolution of what YouTube created. It's what grad students of tomorrow will be used to," said Bourne.

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