The increasing spread of broadband networks has led to a World Wide Web changing from being primarily text based to a richer multimedia environment including both images, audio, and most critically video. Indeed, one only has to look at the emergence of YouTube as a forum for asking potential presidential candidates questions to see that the era of Internet based video has arrived. Metrics of YouTube usage are phenomenal: 100 million downloads a day, 65,000 uploads a day, 20 million unique users per month, and 29% of the US multimedia entertainment market. [1]

Given the explosion of Internet based video content perhaps it should come as no surprise that scientists would embrace the media for dissemination of results and education. As Matthew Cockeril of BioMed Central noted, “Video is an increasingly important medium for scientific communication”[2] Recent conferences such as the invitation only event Scifoo 07 hosted by Nature and the O’Reilly group held focused sessions on the use of internet based video for science. [2]

Video offers the ability to add insight into techniques that may not be easily ascertained from written research papers. As Dr. Arnold Kriegstein from the University of California San Francisco noted, "Highlighting little tricks in a video that might not be apparent in a paper can save an enormous amount of time, There's an old adage in medicine about learning: See one, do one, teach one. It carries over to the research lab, too." [3]

The first generation of scientific video content has been professionally published thus ensuring high quality and through an editorial review processes the scientific accuracy of content. Sites such as Jove.com or Sciencehack exemplify this approach and feel similar to a science segment one might see on a major television broadcast channel.

However, as tools for video content creation and viewing have become readily available there is an increasing number of sites which feature “amateur video” scientific content. It should be noted that the “amateur” nature of this content often only refers to the video production and not the underlying scientific content. Indeed, video on sites such as SciVee is often scientifically much deeper in breadth and depth than that available from so called “professional” sites. Just as the decentralization of production led to an increased in amateur video online through channels such as YouTube the same phenomena will occur in the sciences.

Life Sciences will lead the initial production of on-line scientific video content. A survey of current scientific video repositories reveals a preponderance of videos in this subject area and a number of newly established community sites such as JOVE and DNATube are focused in life sciences. The reason for this leadership may be two-fold: 1) advanced life sciences are dominated by lab research which may lend itself to video documentation of techniques, 2) visualization has been firmly embraced by life sciences as a way for better understanding data.

Increases in the self-production of scientific video are likely to have a variety of substantial long-term impacts. First, since amateur video is produced by the individual copyright is retained by the scientist allowing them to more easily and broadly share their results. The importance of this change should not be minimized. Initial efforts to build out "digital libraries" were hampered by the fact that once an article is submitted to a scientific journal (say Nature or Science) the individual author no longer legally has rights to that material. The self-publication of video content will make it conceptually easier to build out meta-repositories.

Second, video as a means of communication could be a powerful tool for spreading both information and misinformation. The inherently "viral" nature of the video media makes it more quickly consumable by professionals and the lay audience. Apart from pure scientific error, the proliferation of "amateur" publishing technologies will lead to a lot of junk science being posted which will reinforce the need to have a way to determine valid content. The first quantitive study done of this problem just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association helps forecast how much of an issue this could become.

"University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the
first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or
ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that
portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information,
including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at
large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available
online.

[1] http://open.typepad.com/open/2006/07/0_60_in_under_1.html
[2] http://www.nature.com/scifoo/everything.html
[3] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/jove