SciVee: scientists with faces and complicated stories to share
Posted by attilachordash on August 20, 2007
SciVee is a new multimedia and community site where scientists can “a., upload a video and synchronize it to their paper b., publish it as a podcast c., create a professional profile and join science groups”. So SciVee is a way for scientists to “communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article.”
SciVee is in a close partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Obviously it is not a little start-up founded and led by 2 talented college dropouts, but a site with full academic and perhaps financial support. Maybe in academic science that is a guarantee for success and becoming mainstream. Maybe not. It is possible that scientists simply don’t change as fast to follow the current happenings in the scientific web. The user interface is really friendly. At this point there are only 4 Pubcasts available.
Update: comment from Troy McConaghy: The SciVee Terms of Use are confusing. They *say* that videos there have a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, but they also say (in the text of the Terms of Use) that the license in NonCommercial and ShareAlike. Yet the license they specifically name and link to is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which doesn’t care about commercial use or the licensing of derivative works. I’ve been trying to contact them to get this cleared up ASAP, but have had no luck. Could you please try to contact them too?
Pedro Beltrao said
I found that text box on top of the presentation quite out of place. We can turn it off but I don’t understand why it is on by default and on top of presentation instead of below for example.
Kambiz Kamrani said
I’m all for stuff like this, but SciVee has some flaws already. One of them is we bloggers don’t have an easy way to embed the video. This will affect how many people adopt this technology. I’ve outlined some of the other flaws in my post here. I hope the people over at SciVee figure these things out.
P.S. I disagree, the UI is not user-friendly. The color overload seen on the terms of use is a prime example of how more is not more.
Kambiz
Troy McConaghy said
The SciVee Terms of Use (at http://www.scivee.tv/terms_of_use ) are confusing. The *say* that videos there have a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, but they also say (in the text of the Terms of Use) that the license in NonCommercial and ShareAlike. Yet the license they specifically name and link to is the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which doesn’t care about commercial use or the licensing of derivative works. I’ve been trying to contact them to get this cleared up ASAP, but have had no luck. Could you please try to contact them too?
attila csordas said
Thanks Troy, post updated.
ouroboros said
Sounds a lot like JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which is now in its 6th issue.
I’m curious why PLoS and NSF didn’t try to affiliate with the existing journal rather than support a relative newcomer. Competition is good but redundancy is bad.
My Biotech Life » SciVee brings more video to Science said
[...] a little late on this one, but I’d like to express my amazement by the way the great people at PLoS manage [...]
bioadventurist said
i’d also like to know why PLoS didn’t try to partner with JoVE, especially considering SciVee’s layout looks so much like JoVE, which has been around for almost a year. check them out at http://www.JoVE.com. there’s some interesting productions on there like this one:
http://www.jove.com/Details.htm?ID=197&VID=180
loeffelmacher said
it is not related to JoVE? At first, but also at second sight I got the strong impression that they took a very close look at JoVE’s design…
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siere