ScienceOnline'09: Video in Scientific Research

In the second session I attended Saturday, Moshe Pritsker of JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) and Apryl Bailey of SciVee talked about two options for publishing research videos: journal-like and YouTube-like.

• why publish research videos? to demonstrate techniques that aren't easily explained
• essentially pits a scientific article description against a demonstration
• text does NOT provide adequate description of biological experiments; solution is to visualize description of experimental methods
• similar to cooking: helps if someone shows you either in real-life or TV show
• JoVE is a video journal; indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE
• focuses on three key issues: incentives, tools, format
• grants and publications are two things scientists care about, so JoVE is a video journal not a video database
• has an editorial board
• operates a distributed network of video production to help those who lack the necessary tools [none in NC, closest in GA]
• videos are divided by chapters
• although not immediately available on site, embedded code for flash videos available upon request for including in papers
• brings video and text together
• are scientists taught not to speak in jargon? as publication intended for other experts in field, jargon may not be a problem, as the video visualizes the jargon; also pointed out that verbal description of experiment methodology often different than written description
• video production network is competitive advantage for JoVE
• 70,000 visitors/month; 200,000 downloads; 80% scientific/academic visitors
• SciVee is a science media repository: a science video website that can be synchronized with other media
• pubcast = peer-reviewed paper + video
• people more quickly grasp paper topic
• offers profiles and communities so people can connect on SciVee; lots of room for growth in this area
• people wanted to upload videos not connected to papers, so SciVee began accepting
• postercasts document transient poster session information; gets research to a larger audience
• from postercasts people developed slidecasts
• papercasts is a new format about to be rolled out: videos and papers not published in peer-reviewed journals
• JoVE charges a $1000 production fee if they do the video through network, but if a researcher creates a video there is no charge to publish in JoVE
• SciVee's poster presentation feature very helpful
• biology and medicine are the most sensitive fields to visual description but could be expanded to chemistry, applied physics, ecology, etc.
• SciVee uses share revenue model with conferences by agreeing to host posters
• in addition to charging for video production, JoVE also sells advertising, had European investments
• JoVe is for-profit; SciVee is moving from non-profit to for-profit
• SciVee tries to negotiate OA when working with others not amenable to OA
• SciVee's software is proprietary, but might eventually move toward open source
• viewers have to be cognizant of commercial vs. educational video
• SciVee can be embedded but not duplicated on own website or blog
• can't say that much in script; bulk of info in written part; layperson wouldn't understand because need to have basic knowledge; benefit to simplifying so mass scientific audience can understand, but not necessarily mass general audience
• talking through methods while demonstrating uses different language than writing methods
• might be best to have different language in video than accompanying text so people can view/assess from two different angles
• just as likely to find appeal among older scientists who have tenure because more willing to experiment than among younger scientists who are more techno hip
• institutions would be nervous about videos with animals being posted despite videos being peer-reviewed for proper handling; issues include safety for researchers when face is shown; regular publishing at least only gives name

ScienceOnline'09: Open Access Publishing

After a fantastic Friday afternoon behind-the-scenes tour of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh, ScienceOnline'09 kicked off to a great start Saturday morning with a session on the present and future state of Open Access (OA) publishing, led by Bill Hooker and Bjoern Brembs. Although I (obviously) didn't live blog this year's conference, I took copious notes and will share them as is (well, with erroneous spellings corrected...).

• Peter Suber gave up tenure to promote OA full-time; defines OA literature as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions"
• online makes OA possible
• fewer than half of OA journals charge fees but because of BMC and PLoS, that is the model most people know
• OA archives can be searched as one virtual archive using OAIster
• ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) is a list of the green road to OA; place to go to find repository to put your work in
• benefits [of repositories? OA? notes unclear - sorry]: maximizes research efficiency; assessment, monitoring & management; scalability; return on (public) investment
• OA citation advantage is a little controversial, but evidence is mounting
• part of the overlooked argument is scalability: untapped potential of text mining
• iHOP (Information Hyperlinked Over Proteins): pulls sentences out of literature and builds long paragraph of disconnected statements to reorder into brief summary of field; only has PubMed abstracts to mine, not full text
• we have an overwhelming amount of information available
• you can't read 35,000+ papers or even 3800+ reviews but your computer can; it is possible for it to pull out info and aggregate
• GenBank is a great example of what public, open data can do; there now exists a community-wide expectation of openness around gene sequencing
• librarian salaries are keeping pace with CPI but not journal prices
• median annual serials expenditures in 2006: $3m-$12m
• earliest name for OA was Free Online Scholarship
• Bjoern couldn't get access to his own article because his institution's library didn't subscribe to the journal
• food for thought: if overnight the journal publishing industry collapsed, how would you restructure? if you were king for the day, how would you redo the system?
• if the system is faulty, why are so many TA journals (traditional, subscription-based) being created by existing publishers? PROFIT
• societies are also proliferating TA journals; want to serve members, but TA journals rob members of work and money; must acknowledge that while some membership dues include journal subscription, libraries are still required to purchase
• journal quality (i.e., impact factor) proxy for article quality simply does not work [I was amazed at how many people in the room did not seem to realize this; quite worrisome]
• two problems researchers face: 1) how to get research out and used?, and 2) how to assess quality of research?
• right now we are trying to do this together, but ideally in the future needs to be separate
• everybody wants to publish and everybody has to find a place to publish even when it's bad because it is necessary to placate university/institutional demands
• PLoS Biology was never designed to make money but to promote OA and prove that OA journals can be competitive; PLoS One is beginning to make money and subsidizes the other PLoS titles; standard publishing also relies on making money on some "work horse" journals to subsidize the costs of others
• if Einstein can be wrong about quantum physics, we can certainly be wrong in our assessment of individual papers
• people want to read their fields' top-level publications not others
• scholarly enterprise of science doesn't make profit; someone else - often publishers - make profit
• could pay peer-reviewers and archive publications in own libraries' archives/repositories, which makes them accessible to all
• majority of Nobel-winning work rejected from top-tier journals (anecdotal)
• when cost comparisons are made, which is the most efficient way to subsidize publishing: libraries paying subscriptions, or scientists paying OA costs...?
• if a researcher has an annual grant of $250,000, likely not going to balk at paying $1600 to publish in BMC because his/her research would then be open and accessible
• if there is a wash between subscription costs vs. OA charges, then why not shift to OA?
• would shift to OA only force more grant-subsidized research and marginalize non-grant funded researchers? not necessarily because fees may be waived
• what happens if OA publications go under; how is content accessed?; issue of OA publication going under no different than any other e-journal going under, as libraries don't own electronic content anyway; libraries have plans in place to prevent complete loss of access: LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico; many OA journals/articles also archived in PubMed Central and other repositories