Video publishing FEATURE
learning is about adapting to these changing learning styles and ensuring that we are at the forefront of supporting the needs of the researchers, learning more about the challenges and opportunities of learning styles and how they wish to engage with the material.’ Her colleague, Martha Sedgwick, added: ‘From focus groups, we have found that video increases the likelihood of people staying within the subject or feeling that they are getting more from the subject. So the opportunity is certainly there to ensure that our authors’ work is more accessible and used by the research community.’
While the SAGE video collections and journal articles are separate from each other, the company is integrating video and other resources into some collections. ‘We have some journals that have associated vodcasts (video on demand broadcasting), and our SAGE Research Methods and Encyclopaedias have videos alongside the text content for online delivery,’ explained Sedgwick.
Challenges
There are many opportunities but also a number of challenges, whichever way publishers choose to use video. One of these
is file size. ‘On our side of things, there are challenges around handling the large files, particularly for authors to get the files to us. We had to put a new procedure in place because the videos are accepted outside of the usual peer-review system,’ said IOP’s Wright. Mark Reynard, business manager at
IET.tv (the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s broadband television service) agreed: ‘A video or online corporate/ institutional TV channel creates a number of unique issues over standard document hosted solutions as each individual video can be thousands of times larger than a PDF document or text-based object. This creates large issues surrounding storage.’
Related to this is the challenge of bandwidth. Technology company Semantico is involved with video projects for some of its clients. Clare Wratten, the company’s PR and marketing manager, said: ‘Serving video content is naturally more bandwidth- intensive than HTML pages and therefore we advise the use of a CDN (content delivery network) service.’
Cloud-hosted services, such as Amazon CloudFront or Brightcove, she said, ensure that users have an optimum streaming
experience and flexible storage. She added that providing high editorial quality for a low production cost is another challenge. Managing quality requires new processes for video, according to Wright of IOP: ‘We had to come up with new processes to manage the editorial challenges around areas such as quality control and permissions. Permissions were tricky because you have to ensure that you have all the right permissions if the researcher has introduced new images and artwork beyond the original article.’ Such issues become more pronounced when the video content may have been produced initially for somebody else. Adam Gardner, Europe general manager of Alexander Street Press, said one of the challenges for that company is licensing content. ‘Audio/visual IPs normally charge fees/expect royalties per second of content used. That is not appropriate for the academic market,’ he explained. There are also issues with old materials. ‘We license a lot of old materials,’ said Gardner, who explained that degradation of celluloid film is one potential problem.
Involvement of third parties can be tricky too, as Reynard of IET noted. ‘The viewer
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