# Science Video Journal
(name mad pending)

## Mission Statement

Two critical problems in society motivate the formation of this journal. First there is a growing disconnect between scientists and society, driven by
misinformation campaigns and culture wars, but also driven by the fundamental disconnect between how we (scientists) publish our work and how
the average citizen engages with information, which brings up the second problem: scientific publishing is broken. The core ideas that generated scientific publishing remain critical to scientific progress: peer-review, a continuously updating scientific knowledge base, and a common ground for idea-exchanges. However, scientific publishing faces a bevy of challenges including: predatory journals, high demand for reviewers who get no compensation for their work, inherent trade-offs between expensive open-access publishing versus publishing in paywall journals, and strong incentives to publish Minimum Publishable Units to maximize citation counts and publications. While some of these problems are being addressed by the scientific community (notably with the explosion of pre-print servers), we think a video journal aimed at publishing cutting-edge science that can be understood by anyone will address the some of the core brokenness in academic publishing. More importantly, we think it can address a critical gap between science and society by connecting more people to our work and to us.

## What a video journal can do

+ Supplement the archaic scientific publication machine with a modern alternative.
+ Provide an opportunity for scientists to communicate their work to a larger and broader audience.
+ Overcome barriers to effective science communication: paywalls, exorbitant publishing fees, painfully dry and convoluted science prose.
+ Compensate reviewers for their work.
+ Increase equity in access to scientific progress

## How this will work

+ Scientists, either on their own or collaborating with creative artists, will make stand-alone videos of their research.
+ These videos, their transcripts, and datasets and code used to make them will be sent out to other scientists for peer-review.
+ Peer-reviewers will suggest scientific and stylistic advice (guided by our best practices). All reviews will be signed and open to the public.
+ If video reviews well and reviewers suggest accepting, we will publish the video on our YouTube channel and website.
+ Revenue from advertisements on the channel will be split as follows: 50% to the author, 10% to the reviewers, and 40% to us.
+ We will use our portion of revenue to grow the channel visibility, target collaborations with the large education focused YouTube channels, and generally work to connect more people to the science on our journal.

## The Original (and Lazy Plan)

1. Identify ~20-100 scientists, science communicators, or e-artists who will contribute an inaugural wave of short videos.
2. Give them targeted guidance and set a submission date
3. Build an attractive and informative web platform in which videos will be embedded. They'll be hosted on youtube.

## The Katy Plan
1. Target 5 people who will make Beta videos.
2. Work with these folks to make stunningly high quality examples of what our journal could do.
3. Launch with these 5-7 videos and then iterate based on feedback
4. Repeat with 10-15 people and again second launch (though no longer in Beta).
5. Fully launch once 20 or so videos have been hosted and open up for general submission.