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Science gets its YouTube on with SciVee

Science may be ready for the YouTube era thanks to the arrival of SciVee, …

Philip Bourne, professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, wonders how science got left behind. In his view, the academic science community pioneered the development of the Internet, but innovation has since shifted to the commercial sphere. But he's hoping that his new project, SciVee, brings science back a bit closer to the cutting edge by combining user-generated video content with tagging and communities. Ars talked with Dr. Bourne about his efforts.

The initial premise behind SciVee is to provide a form of scientific communication that's intermediate between abstracts (which take a few minutes to read) and a full reading of a paper (which can take hours). The primary type of video presentation that SciVee intends to host could be called a "pubcast," in which a researcher provides a short video description of their work that's synchronized to the display of text from the paper. Initial efforts have been focused on the Open Access PLoS journals, which allow the use of the text, to stay clear of copyright issues.

Bourne hopes that SciVee pubcasts will help solve the information overload currently facing biomedical scientists; he cited figures indicating that the PubMed database indexes 16,000 new publications a week. He noted some informal work he's done that suggested that people viewing a pubcast get a bit more out of it than they get from reading an abstract, even though the time invested isn't significantly greater.

Drawing in contributors

SciVee What's the incentive for researchers to put the effort into creating a pubcast? "There's actually a low barrier to entry," Bourne said. "All you need is a webcam and iMovie or Movie Maker." The SciVee site has tutorials for recording and editing video content on both Mac and Windows platforms. Once the resulting video is uploaded, the site's software walks users through synchronizing it with the text of the paper. Bourne expects that grad students will produce much of the initial content, as SciVee provides them with a way to present their work to the entire academic community, an opportunity generally reserved for more senior researchers. "It's a chance to reach an international audience with your very first paper," he said.

Long term, though, Bourne suggests that more senior researchers will be pulled in: "It's the same appeal as open access publishing—these papers will have a better chance of being cited and creating a dialog about the results." He hopes to build a diversity of content in the same manner. "Currently, we're working with PLoS journals, contact authors of papers published in them via e-mail." Bourne said, "but we also estimate we can retrieve e-mail addresses for up to 25 percent of the papers indexed by PubMed."

The site is also open to materials beyond pubcasts; they're already hosting video presentations from high school students who worked at UCSD. "We hope to inspire other kids," he said. SciVee could also host material that's not based on a publication, such as podcasts of lectures. But no format has been ruled out so far. "We hope to change the way science is disseminated and allow people to be creative," said Bourne. "We've focused on the 'serious news' so far, but there's certainly room for the reality show equivalent."

Ensuring quality content while planning to scale

SciVee doesn't have a mechanism for peer review. New submissions go into a holding area for five days; during that time, the paper's other authors have a chance to comment or reject the video. Once it goes live, the community has a "report abuse" button to let administrators know of inappropriate content. "From our perspective, the only way to handle this is through an automated mechanism," said Bourne. He'd love to get an editor for the site to handle these issues and possibly manage the creation of the video equivalent of review papers.

Professor Bourne admits that this might be "wishful thinking," given SciVee's finances. "The NSF [National Science Foundation] loves this, and we've gotten seed money from them, but ensuring the longevity of SciVee is our first order of business," he said. Bourne describes himself as "flabbergasted" by the interest so far, but it hasn't yet translated to stable, long-term funding.

For now, however, SciVee is well prepared for interest and content to build. It's largely built from open-source components, such as MySQL and Drupal; homegrown code links these components together. Bourne says they're hoping to refine the existing setup via partnerships with companies that have expertise in search and video delivery in the future. The site is currently hosted on a set of redundant servers at the UCSD Supercomputer Center. "Bandwidth will not be an issue," joked Bourne. "We've done some rough calculations, and we're ready for an increase in traffic."

Having viewed a number of the pubcasts, I think that Bourne clearly has a point; by walking you through the body of the paper and having the author emphasize the key data points, the videos clearly have a higher information content than the abstract but don't take nearly as long as reading the actual publication does. So far, however, the available content remains pretty sparse. Hopefully, interest will ramp up as more people become aware of it, since it does have the potential to become a valuable addition to the various approaches used to disseminate information to scientists in this era of information overload.

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