SciVee

Last updated
SciVee, Inc.
Type of business Subsidiary
Type of site
hosting science video combined with documents and images
URL SciVee
RegistrationOptional(required to upload, synchronize, rate and to comment on videos)
LaunchedDecember 3, 2007
Current statusDown

SciVee [1] was a science video sharing website where researchers could upload, view and share science video clips and connect them to scientific literature, posters and slides from 2007 to 2015. The SciVee website is partnered with three groups: The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a publisher of a series of open access (OA) journals who have added content to the website, the National Science Foundation (NSF), who provided seed funding to start the website, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), who houses SciVee's video servers and data for the website. The University of California, San Diego-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display video combined with documents and imagery via SciVee's patent pending rich web applications or "virtual studio" WYSIWYG to combine, or "synchronize" them with a published scientific article from a scientific journal or poster from a scientific conference poster session. Any video synchronized with a published scientific article is called a "pubcast," 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.

Contents

Research 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 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, 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 website allowing participation 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 dubbed SciVee the "YouTube for Science." [2] 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 [3] and USA Today 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." [4] 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. [5] The same day, Paul Glazowski at Mashable 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.". [6] The site abruptly disappeared around the end of 2015.

Beliefs & Objectives

Philip Bourne 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 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 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." [7]

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 (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 has to offer, namely widespread use of cyberinfrastructure. 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. [8]

Related Research Articles

Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Center for Supercomputing Applications</span> Illinois-based applied supercomputing research organization

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.

Open-source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com. Although the term was not actually used in the body text of Leonard's article, the headline encapsulated a collaboration between users of the internet technology blog Slashdot and a writer for Jane's Intelligence Review. The writer, Johan J. Ingles-le Nobel, had solicited feedback on a story about cyberterrorism from Slashdot readers, and then re-wrote his story based on that feedback and compensated the Slashdot writers whose information and words he used.

SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elements of the papers are formed, including graphs, diagrams, and citations. Created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, its stated aim is "to maximize amusement, rather than coherence." Originally created in 2005 to expose the lack of scrutiny of submissions to conferences, the generator subsequently became used, primarily by Chinese academics, to create large numbers of fraudulent conference submissions, leading to the retraction of 122 SCIgen generated papers and the creation of detection software to combat its use.

BuzzNet is a photo, journal, and video-sharing social media network that is currently owned by Hive Media. The network was owned by SpinMedia from its inception until September 2016, when it was sold to Hive Media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SciELO</span> Bibliographic database of open access journals

SciELO is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature. Originally established in Brazil in 1997, today there are 16 countries in the SciELO network and its journal collections: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

An anonymous post, is an entry on a textboard, anonymous bulletin board system, or other discussion forums like Internet forum, without a screen name or more commonly by using a non-identifiable pseudonym. Some online forums such as Slashdot do not allow such posts, requiring users to be registered either under their real name or utilizing a pseudonym. Others like JuicyCampus, AutoAdmit, 2channel, and other Futaba-based imageboards thrive on anonymity. Users of 4chan, in particular, interact in an anonymous and ephemeral environment that facilitates rapid generation of new trends.

A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking service, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service attack, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term.

A PubCast is an audiobook-style, abridged and annotated reading of a research article, usually recorded by the author. Several academic journals have shown support for PubCasts, linking directly to them below the abstracts of published articles, including Facets, Fisheries Research, and People and Nature.

E-Science librarianship refers to a role for librarians in e-Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Bourne</span> Physical chemist and computational biologist

Philip Eric Bourne is an Australian bioinformatician, non-fiction writer, and businessman. He is currently Stephenson Chair of Data Science and Director of the School of Data Science and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and was the first associate director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, where his projects include managing the Big Data to Knowledge initiative, and formerly Associate Vice Chancellor at UCSD. He has contributed to textbooks and is a strong supporter of open-access literature and software. His diverse interests have spanned structural biology, medical informatics, information technology, structural bioinformatics, scholarly communication and pharmaceutical sciences. His papers are highly cited, and he has an h-index above 50.

Skeptical Science is a climate science blog and information resource created in 2007 by Australian former cartoonist and web developer, John Cook, who received a PhD degree in cognitive science in 2016. In addition to publishing articles on current events relating to climate science and climate policy, the site maintains a database of articles analyzing the merit of arguments put forth by those who oppose the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multiply (website)</span>

Multiply was a social networking service with an emphasis on allowing users to share media – such as photos, videos and blog entries – with their "real-world" network. The website was launched in March 2004 and was privately held with backing by VantagePoint Venture Partners, Point Judith Capital, Transcosmos, and private investors. Multiply had over 11 million registered users. The company was headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida but moved to Jakarta, Indonesia early in 2012 and recently announced intentions to switch to e-commerce, dropping the social networking aspect entirely. Quantcast estimates Multiply had 2.47 million monthly U.S. unique visitors at their peak on July 30, 2012.

ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by Nature and a 2016 article in Times Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users, although other services have more registered users, and a 2015–2016 survey suggests that almost as many academics have Google Scholar profiles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Produsage</span> User-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments

Produsage is a portmanteau of the words production and usage, coined by German-Australian media scholar Axel Bruns and popularized in his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Produsage is the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments, open source software, and the blogosphere. The concept blurs the boundaries between passive consumption and active production. The distinction between producers and consumers or users of content has faded, as users play the role of producers whether they are aware of this role or not. The hybrid term produser refers to an individual who is engaged in the activity of produsage. This concept is similar and related to commons-based peer production, a term coined by Yochai Benkler.

Enhanced publications or enhanced ebooks are a form of electronic publishing for the dissemination and sharing of research outcomes, whose first formal definition can be tracked back to 2009. As many forms of digital publications, they typically feature a unique identifier and descriptive metadata information. Unlike traditional digital publications, enhanced publications are often tailored to serve specific scientific domains and are generally constituted by a set of interconnected parts corresponding to research assets of several kinds and to textual descriptions of the research. The nature and format of such parts and of the relationships between them, depends on the application domain and may largely vary from case to case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Library Genesis</span> File-sharing website for print publications

Library Genesis (LibGen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sci-Hub</span> Scientific research paper file sharing website

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.

ScienceOpen is a web-based platform, that hosts open access journals. It is freely accessible for readers, authors and publishers, and it generates its revenues via promotional services for publishers and authors' institutions. The organization is based in Berlin and has a technical office in Boston. It is a member of CrossRef, ORCID, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, STM Association and the Directory of Open Access Journals. The company was designated as one of “10 to Watch” by research advisory firm Outsell in its report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”

References

  1. "SciVee". SciVee | Making Science Visible. 2017-09-05. Retrieved 2024-04-12.
  2. "YouTube for Science? - Slashdot". science.slashdot.org. 2007-08-19. Retrieved 2024-04-12.
  3. CNN (December 2007) Scientists make videos for the Web. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/03/science.youtube.ap/
  4. USA Today (December 2007) Niche sites spread science on the Web. Available at:https://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-12-03-science-nice-sites_N.htm
  5. "UC San Diego Today". today.ucsd.edu. Retrieved 2024-04-12.
  6. Glazowski, Paul. (August 26, 2008) "SciVee’s Science Videos Get More Interactive With Virtual Posters." Available at: http://mashable.com/2008/08/28/scivee-postercasts/
  7. Bourne, P., Fink, L. "Reinventing Scholarly Communication for the Electronic Age," CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 3, August 2007. Available at: http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/reinventing-scholarly-communication-for-the-electronic-age/
  8. Fink, L. & Bailey, A. "SciVee: Making Your Research Known Through Web 2.0 Video" FEST Le Idee: MEDIA E SCIENZA, (April 2008) As of October 28, 2008 available at: http://www.festrieste.it/mediaescienza.html

Further Associated References