SciVee is a site where scientists can upload videos that are 5- 10 minute descriptions of their peer-reviewed research papers.  Some of the really good ones synchronize the author’s oral presentation with parts of the paper, for example the charts, graphs and images.  SciVee calls these publication podcasts “Pubcasts.” I have to admit, when I first saw “pubcast,” I thought “Oh the biologists are down at the brewpub again, and decided to podcast their conversations.”  SciVee’s pubcasts are even better than that would be. Using the pubcasts would be a great way to introduce students to the research papers they describe.  SciVee pubcasts also appear to be driving more hits to their corresponding online papers, say in PLOS Biology, so it may be worth it for authors to create pubcasts when publishing new works.

Another aspect of SciVee is the contributed science videos that people can upload to the site. This includes videos of conference presentations and “postercasts” that are not peer-reviewed.  If you create an account on SciVee, you can rate add tags, and share the pubcasts and videos.  You can also embed SciVee videos on your web site.

The third component of SciVee is community and there are quite a number of communities and discussion groups started on the site. The communities don’t seem widely used - some of those with more than one or two members are the American Society of Plant Biologists (7 members), Global Warming (8)  and theWireless Sensor Network Research (also 8 members).  It will be interesting to see how this grows over time.  PLOS and NSF as well as the San Diego Supercomputer Center are partners in this venture.