... [Phil] Bourne saw the emerging trend [of OA] and recruited Leo Chalupa, a friend and colleague at UC Davis, to launch an online video project to help scientists make their research better-known. Bourne and Chalupa were initially unsure if the project they started last year was merely an interesting science project or a business. But they decided to form a startup company earlier this year around what they call SciVee. It is basically a YouTube for academic researchers. ...
Bourne says his first idea was to essentially create “pubcasts,” which typically consist of a 15-minute video in which the author of a published and peer-reviewed article explains the research and highlights the key findings. ...
Scientists also are using SciVee to enhance research published in so-called “poster sessions” at scientific conferences and to form online communities of interest. ...
By providing a technology platform much like YouTube’s, SciVee enables scientists across a host of disciplines to create content in any field of science, technology, or medicine. Bourne says K-12 teachers and other educational users also are using SciVee to post videos likethis for younger students to access. About 1,000 users have posted videos on the site so far. ...
[T]he National Science Foundation ... provided the $175,000 “exploratory grant” that enabled Bourne to get SciVee started. ...
“It is not an advertising supported model,” says [Marc] Friedmann, SciVee’s CEO. “We are distinctly not pursuing the approach of putting up a website, trying to build a lot of traffic for the site, and then realizing revenue through advertising based on that traffic. To this point in time, we’ve built the business with a little bit of government grant support, but we’re looking to commercialize it by generating revenue from paying customers.”
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.
