Got a call from Tom Richardson at the NEJM (who I saw play with the Bearded Pigs at MLA 2008!).

According to Tom, NEJM has no arrangement with Clinical Reader and did not license their content to Clinical Reader. So it appears that Clinical Reader is again violating copyright.

[/UPDATE]

So, Clinical Reader shows video content from the NEJM, including a video on chest tube insertion (yeah, the same one I blogged about a ways back).

I thought this was odd.

After all, if you go to the NEJM’s home for this video, it clearly says one needs a subscription to view the content.

Hmmm.

So I decided to look around for any notes from either organization that would indicate Clinical Reader is using this video content with permission. Didn’t find it. Also didn’t find any published terms under which NEJM offered to license it.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to poke around more to see if anyone else was showing NEJMs content. Sure enough, somebody with a subscription to NEJM downloaded a decent copy and posted it on Vimeo:

It has been viewed there over 1,600 times.

Note to Vimeo: This violates terms of service. The user who uploaded it did not own it (as should be fairly obvious by the title cards). As much as I enjoy free access to high quality video, this belongs to NEJM, not this user. The video should at least be taken down from your servers.

Anyway, Vimeo allows users to download videos in .flv format. I downloaded that .flv with no problem…so now Vimeo is serving as a distribution channel for others who would like unlicensed copies. I wonder if perhaps that is how Clinical Reader got a copy to show from their site.

I’d be interested to hear from the NEJM and Clinical Reader: Was this content licensed to Clinical Reader? If so, why is the video quality so much poorer than in the original at the NEJM’s site OR the Vimeo copy?

If not, why isn’t the NEJM interested that their content is being stolen?

I mean…if I didn’t sweat pesky things like copyright, I think I could build an AMAZING portal for health information…made of other people’s content.

Clinical Reader’s FAQ says:

Clinical Reader respects all copyrights and legal restrictions on content and access. Clinical Reader cannot give a user access to articles to which the user does not already have access to copyright-restricted content. For example, if a user does not have access to a research article in the BMJ (either through an individual subscription or through the user´s institution), Clinical Reader will not be able to show the item in full.

Huh. I don’t have access to NEJM from here at home. But I can still view its content in Clinical Reader.

[EDIT]
Veoh is showing this video, too.

…and medicalvideos.us

…and there’s a RapidShare link on this blog.
[/EDIT]

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Over at Up to the Waves, Lin shares her observations.

Lin also writes, however:

Pubget is only one of the 3rd party life science search engines that tries to create shortcut to search PubMed. If you are a serious researcher, my advise is using the 3rd party search engines with caution or as a pre-search. Getting comfortable and familiar using PubMed itself is your goal. If you need assistance using PubMed, contact your medical librarians.

I can’t wholly agree with this. Not all 3rd-Party PubMed/Medline tools are meant to replace PubMed, and some can simply do things that PubMed itself cannot. If you are a serious researcher, my advice is to make yourself aware of all the tools at your disposal, and use the best ones for the purpose at hand.

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Cell Press and Elsevier have launched a project called Article of the Future [link] that is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques. We have developed prototypes for two articles from Cell to demonstrate initial concepts and get feedback from the scientific community.

Craig Stoltz may be more impressed with these than I am, but he asks an interesting question:

WHY IN HOT SCREAMING HELL HAVE MAINSTREAM NEWS PUBLISHERS NOT DEVELOPED AN “ARTICLE OF THE FUTURE” BASED ON USE WEB CASES LIKE THIS OVER, OH, I DON’T KNOW, THE LAST 15 YEARS OR SO?

Anyone? Bueller?

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So cool.

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Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs because there were fewer records to make, ship, shelve, categorize, alphabetize, and inventory. As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track.

This leaves me thinking: What’s the “natural unit” of health information? Is the article to an issue of a journal what a track is to an LP record? After all, clinicians never come to our library seeking an issue- they come in search of an article.

This leads me back to thinking about Marcus Banks’ idea of using a blog as a journal. If digital distribution eliminates the need to reduce costs by bundling mostly-unrelated articles together once a month, why bundle articles into “issues” for a digital journal? Why not release them online whenever their editorial processes are complete and they’re ready to be “published?”

I was fortunate to finally meet Marcus last week at MLA 2008. We got together along with Melissa Rethlefsen and Rachel Walden to talk about what the future of the journal might look like and agreed, I think, that we have more questions than answers.

Left to right: Marcus Banks, Rachel Walden, David Rothman. Photo by Melissa Rethlefsen and her cool new Blackberry

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…my only reservation is when research methods are used such as randomization and the articles would need to go through peer-review.

T. Scott (former editor of the JMLA and one of my favorite contrarians) explains some of his reservations about the idea:

I’m not one who is terribly impressed by the “wisdom of crowds” (a concept that seems to be especially dubious during the US election season). I’ve rarely seen anything approaching substantive discussion and analysis take place in a comment thread, and the longer the thread, the more worthless it typically is. Rather than providing vibrant post-publication review, I’m afraid that posting unedited articles for comment would result in much good work being buried and ignored.

[...snip...]

Marcus is pushing the right questions, and everyone involved in scholarly publishing, at whatever level, should be thinking creatively about how to make the communication and discussion of projects and ideas more effective.

I’ve noticed my neck often aches after reading T. Scott’s blog. After some investigation, I’ve finally figured out that this is because I can’t seem to stop nodding my head while I read him.

I especially like this last bit of his post:

But it isn’t a matter of journals vs blogs. The most effective modes of communication that we develop over the next decade will adopt features that we associate with each, but will be fundamentally different from either.

I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think that blogs or wikis are going to revolutionize medicine, education, or publishing- but some applications of their descendent technologies might.

Since LIS News and LibraryStuff both posted about it, I’m betting there’ll be more interesting opinions to enjoy soon.

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BioWizard
David L. Rothman
J Med Libr Assoc. 2008 January; 96(1): 74. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.96.1.74.
| Full Text | PDF–988K

Of course, I just realized that BioWizard has significantly changed its interface since I wrote the review. Dangit.

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If you want, you can even embed Blip.tv’s player in your Web site and let your library’s patrons watch these videos from the comfort of your library’s own intranet presence. Easy instructions on how to do this are here.

Edit: Sorry! I failed at first to link the post at The MARquee! This has been remedied above.

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In addition to our YouTube channel, we are working with SciVee to ensure the visibility and linking of PubCasts featuring BioMed Central articles. For example, SciVee currently features a pubcast by Apostol Gramada in which he describes the research he published in BMC Bioinformatics.

Berci seems pretty excited about the prospect of more publishers doing the same, but I find myself wondering how much money and time publishers (or writers/editors) are going to invest in producing video content to compliment or promote their written works.

Should be interesting to keep an eye on, regardless.

Fun Little Hack:
If you’d like to subscribe to new videos that are posted in this channel without having to log into YouTube, you can subscribe to this RSS feed.

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