SciVee
Encyclopedia
SciVee is a science video sharing website where researchers can upload, view and share science video clips and connect them to scientific literature
Scientific literature
Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...

, posters and slides. The SciVee website is partnered with three groups: The Public Library of Science
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...

 (PLoS) , a publisher of a series of open access (OA) journals who have added content to the website, the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 (NSF), who provided seed funding to start the website, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center
San Diego Supercomputer Center
The San Diego Supercomputer Center is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego . Physically, SDSC is located on the east end of Eleanor Roosevelt College on the campus of UCSD....

 (SDSC), who houses SciVee's video servers and data for the website. The University of California San Diego-based service uses Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...

 technology to display video combined with documents and imagery via SciVee's patent pending rich internet applications (RIA) or "virtual studio" WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

 to combine, or “synchronize” them with a published scientific article from a scientific journal or poster from a scientific conference poster session
Poster session
A poster session or poster presentation is the presentation of research information by an individual or representatives of research teams at a congress or conference with an academic or professional focus. The work is usually peer reviewed...

.  Any video synchronized with a published scientific article is called a “pubcast
Pubcast
A pubcast is an online presentation that includes the combination of video with a published research article. This is accomplished by using an in-browser application software that enables the ability to select particular portions of the published article to be displayed at particular points in a...

,” while a video that is synchronized with a scientific conference session poster is called a “postercast.” Science videos that are not synchronized with a scientific article or poster can be uploaded and linked with supplementary files.

Research
Research
Research can be defined as the scientific search for knowledge, or as any systematic investigation, to establish novel facts, solve new or existing problems, prove new ideas, or develop new theories, usually using a scientific method...

 scientists are the primary audience for the website, but students of all levels, educators and the general public also use the site. Video content ranges from dense and highly technical explanations of scientific publications to elementary school level science. Unregistered users can watch the videos and use the provided embed code to vlog
Vlog
Video blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging or vidding or vidblogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video, and is a form of Web television. Entries often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take...

 to videos into external websites, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos, synchronize scientific documents, add commentary to the site, create public profiles, and join or create communities. Registration is free and provides access to a full social networking service that allows registered members to interact with other members through private messaging, blogging, and open community discussions.

History

With seed funding from NSF
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

, two professors from the University of California, Phil Bourne and Leo Chalupa, founded the website. In early 2007, Phil and Leo put together a small team of people to create the Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 website allowing participation
Participatory culture
Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers . The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published...

 membership to a social science network with video and article upload. SciVee was named by combining the words "science" and "video". After initial development, the website began accepting its first video uploads August 1, 2007. Nineteen days after going online in a pre-alpha test state, Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...

 dubbed SciVee the “YouTube for Science.” The official alpha site launch took place September 1, 2007. Based on the feedback received from the initial boom of new members from being Slashdotted, the SciVee team made updates to the website to accommodate customer demands and launched its beta release December 3, 2007. That day, CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

 and USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...

 featured articles about a video created by four UC San Diego science and film students showing "a typical recrystallization experiment straight out of Chemistry 101." Since then, SciVee has added more features to the site including discussions, blogging, extended profiles and other community options. On August 26, 2008, SciVee launched a new postercast capability. The same day, Paul Glazowski at Mashable
Mashable
Mashable is an American news website and Internet news blog founded by Pete Cashmore. The website's primary focus is social media news, but also covers news and developments in mobile, entertainment, online video, business, web development, technology, memes and gadgets...

 referred to the release as "a new option for users to upload feature material in the form of “postercasts” that enable users to complement their traditional video presentations with an interactive documentation component. The synchronous delivery of these is remarkably user-friendly."

Beliefs & Objectives

Philip Bourne
Philip Bourne
Philip Eric Bourne is a professor of pharmacology at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego ....

 stated in his article in CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 3, August 2007:
"We believe that the research community is ripe for a revolution in scientific communication and that the current generation of scientists will be the one to push it forward. These scientists, generally graduate students and new post-docs, have grown up with cyberinfrastructure
Cyberinfrastructure
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over...

 as a part of their daily lives, not just a specialized aspect of their profession. They have a natural ability to do science in an electronic environment without the need for printed publications or static documents and, in fact, can feel quite limited by the traditional format of a publication. Perhaps most importantly, they appreciate that the sheer amount of data and the number of publications is prohibitive to the traditional methods of keeping current with the literature....To this end, we have developed SciVee, which allows authors to upload an article they have already published (open access, naturally) with a video or podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

 presentation (about 10 minutes long) that they have made that describes the highlights of the paper. The author can then synchronize the video with the content of the article (text, figures, etc.) such that the relevant parts of the article appear as the author discusses them during the video presentation. We call the result a pubcast."


Lynn Fink, SciVee's scientific developer, stated in her article submitted to FEST, the International Science Media Fair in Trieste:
"Keeping current with the literature is a crucial part of doing science. It is, however, getting increasingly more difficult due to the growing number of articles that are published. SciVee aims to make this task easier and faster by delivering the key points of articles in an accessible and enjoyable medium – the pubcast: a short video of the author speaking about their published paper while the text of their paper is displayed next to the video. Prior to the open access movement, the creation of pubcasts would have been prohibitively difficult and readers would be forced to face a growing stack of articles to read. Fortunately, with pubcasts, readers can interact with several articles in the time it would take to read a single full article in the traditional way... We believe that the emergence of open access literature is the spur that will drive innovation in scientific communication. In contrast to closed access literature, where publishers require a subscription to access content, articles that are published as open access are available for immediate viewing, download, and distribution. Furthermore, the author retains the copyright, rather than the publisher, under a Creative Commons license
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...

 (usually CCAL 2.5 or 3.0) which grants the author much more freedom in the use of their own work. This license also grants considerable freedom to a consumer of this article. Specifically, the CCAL licenses under which most open access articles are published allow a consumer to "make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium". SciVee takes full advantage of this by integrating the full text of the articles with web-based video... The traditional article format no longer effectively supports the research in the current age. We believe that taking advantage of open access articles in this way will have a significant impact on the scientific community. SciVee modernizes scientific publishing and communication by taking advantage of the possibilities the information age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...

 has to offer, namely widespread use of cyberinfrastructure
Cyberinfrastructure
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over...

. SciVee makes the process of creating and consuming scientific literature more enjoyable and accessible. We hope that scientific community will embrace these efforts and help make scientific communication."
more effective.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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