Have any of you taken a peep at Abstract Tube yet? Based in Columbus [Ohio, USA], they are doing something unique that just caught our attention. What we understood is that they are creating a video sharing website like youtube but centered at abstract videos. Do you know what distinguishes Abstract Tube from Youtube? Youtube has become a dumping ground where you can throw all kinds of videos clean politics, dirty sports, cute propaganda, fan-made live news, non-recognized stock trading videos, unfiltered new full movie releases, and so on. The abstract videos, they are focusing the most are from journal articles, conference presentations, thesis & dissertation, patents, books and even educational or documentary movies such as “Home”, “Planet Earth Series”, or arts and technology used to create “the Hobbit” etc. Abstract Tube Inc. founder, Sarbojeet Jana says he came up with the idea of creating a specific video portal for academic abstract videos for mainly three reasons. 1. To create a dedicated depositary for abstract videos, 2. To create a proper citation mechanism (in youtube, it’s hard to trace who is that ‘user123’ and how come the same video can be uploaded by several people, who to actually credit when citing?), 3. To ‘get found’ easy by title, author name etc.
We also explored that there is a trend towards creating video abstract in the journal publishing community and some abstract video creation service providers such as Researchsquare, American Journal Experts etc. charge almost $1500 to create a professional video abstract for journal articles. In the long run, this could be helpful for college students as unique video content creators. In a college campus, there are so many students who are good at handling with cameras, good at explaining, speaking in front of camera, or good at script writing. If you are in college and looking for something productive to do, we think this is indeed a great option to opt for.
There is a recent blog post by Abstract Tube entitled “What is a Video Abstract?”, they showed styles of different video abstract examples, and those are quite interesting. Our personal feeling is that a video abstract does induce you into reading the whole article to investigate further. Abstract video has that unique ability to enlighten you any boring or complex topic, an anecdote for a boring class lecture maybe, hah?
Published in Columbus CEO, there is an argument that industry experts feel positive about the video abstract creation idea for a complex scientific paper but also they pointed out that old researchers would have trouble getting accustomed to this new practice. It’s no doubt to admit that video consumption is not going to a sudden halt any time sooner. Abstract Tube founder praised that abstract video creation has more momentum in Europe than USA.