If you are working in a field, like cell and molecular biology, you are probably a heavyweight user of various imaging methods like laser scanning confocal microscopy, deconvolution microscopy or just lean on normal fluorescence microscopy. Increasingly you are involved in the making of gigabyte sized time lapse videos on living cells or 3D imaging visualizations made by special software, illustrating the biological phenomenon, pattern or effect you are publishing an article on. So scientific videos are more and more important part of scientific arguments in the life sciences.
So here I'd like to suggest for researchers who are making videos and upload it, the powerful editors of peer-review journals, coders, geeks in the uprising web video market to meditate on the possibility ofliberating the so called supplementary science videos of peer-review articles and give some light to them by making them freely available and distributable on the web! What about a strict, searchable scientific video sharing site?
Points of persuasion:
1. the web is the natural home of multimedia files of scientific studies, not the published journal articles, so why not make available them in an open access style?
2. there must be some working creative commons like license construction referring to just multimedia parts of the supporting information section, not the whole article, which is good for the Publishing Groups, does not hurt their interests, but does enormous good for individual researchers, searching information outside their academic institutions for the public (if you heard of any type of license like this, please inform me, I am ignorant in this respect)
3. videos, 3D animations are convincing, sometimes crucial forces of scientific arguments in life sciences, so what about a free abstract+supporting information construction?
4. from a presentation point of view, videos are really spectacular and the liberation of science videos can do much for popularizing science worldwebwide
5. imagine a youtube-like video site collecting these videos and make them available for every web user
6. timing: the current web is dominantly about videos and video sharing
What I have in mind here, is a JoVE like website, serving as an ideal host of peer-review scientific videos, animations, audios….
The closest relative is BioMed Search, a Google-like Biomedical Image Search Engine which is currently unavailable due to some problems.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
