Feature
Life through a lens
At Frankfurt Book Fair, Research Information heard claims that the use of video in scholarly publishing is ‘hockey-sticking’. Tim Gillett zooms in on the action
Just a few years ago, video was still a relatively new concept in the world of academic publishing. Even in the two- year period from 2013 to 2015, reports Alexander Street Press’s David Parker, there was little change in terms of the use and acquisition of scholarly video content. The company’s senior vice president
for editorial and licensing stopped short of confirming that it was experiencing the ‘hockey-stick’ effect (very fast growth after a relatively flat period), but told Research Information that there is now a ‘huge demand’ for hybrid multimedia. Indeed, at Charleston Library Conference, where we interviewed Parker, there were many sessions focusing on how libraries are increasingly engaging with video as a learning medium. Parker said: ‘The fast growth that we are
seeing is being driven largely by a low cost of entry. It’s relatively cheap these days to produce a video – and of course the fact
that bandwidth has become much less of an issue is driving growth in a big way. Market penetration is still generally very low in global terms, so there is plenty of potential.’ As with any new technology, the growth of video has been driven by the limitations of its predecessors. The US company Research Square conducted a survey with Springer Nature, in which 37 per cent of authors said that they don’t know how to communicate their results effectively to the general public, and 47 per cent said that they have no control over the successful promotion of their research. Research Square’s global
“Some 37 per cent of authors don’t know how to communicate their results effectively to the public”
4 Research Information December 2016/January 2017
communications manager Ben Mudrak explains: ‘These responses clearly identify a problem in research communication, and we are working to solve it through video content. ‘Our core video product is a one- to
two-minute animated video abstract designed to communicate the significance of research results to a broad audience. We aim to minimise costs and reduce the amount of effort required by the author and publisher, so we do not require any on-location filming and have our team of science communicators generate a script directly from a journal or review article. Over the past year, we have had many researchers buy a video directly, but we also work with publishers such as Springer Nature and Wiley that are looking to create video abstracts on behalf of their authors.’ Mudrak also reports good business in
the sector: ‘The current challenge with video is figuring out who will pay. Because
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