Open Access to Video

Status Report 2007

Peter Suber:

"In 2007 there was an explosion of interest in OA videos for scholarship, research, and education. PLoS and partners launched SciVee ("YouTube for scientists"), specializing in OA videos explaining OA journal articles. New collections of OA science videos launched at AthenaWeb, Bioscreencast, DNATube, Science Hack, SciTalks, VideoLectures, and the video channel at Science Daily. The Video Journal of Conference Presentations is a peer-reviewed OA journal of conference presentations. BioMed Central launched a YouTube channel, increased its support for video in multi-media BMC articles, and joined with Intelligent Television to launch the Open Access Documentary Project, which will produce documentary videos about open access. The University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California launched their own YouTube channels for lectures and public events. Yale's new open courseware project features OA videos of actual classroom sessions. JISC and the Wellcome Trust teamed to provide open access to 400+ films important in the history of medicine. SPARC announced the first annual SPARC Discovery Awards, or Sparkies, a contest for videos on information sharing. Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University, organized a campaign asking US TV networks to release their presidential debate broadcasts either to the public domain or under a CC license; Barak Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodds endorsed the campaign; CNN agreed to participate and Fox News did not. In short, bandwidth and tools — which will only get better — make it easy to bring the power of video to other forms of exposition, helping to move online scholarship beyond digital replicas of print scholarship." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)