NSF joins EurekAlert! portal

The National Science Foundation has become one of the growing band of organisations establishing "mini sites" on EurekAlert!, the media service run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The new site, News From the National Science Foundation, has both news of the NSF and from research that it has funded. There is also a RSS feed to make life easier for those of us who have moved away from email as a preferred way of receiving press releases.

SciVee, a YouTube for scientists

Yet another attempt to create a "social network" for specialists. This time the idea is to give scientists the opportunity to "upload published papers, as well as a podcast presenting the paper".

We read about SciVee on CORDIS, the EU's news site, which tells us that the people backing the venture include the Public Library of Science (PLoS); the US' National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). This probably explains why "authors must have published their paper in an open access journal in order to upload it to SciVee."

The site itself says that "Created for scientists, by scientists, SciVee moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater taking advantage of the internet as a communication medium where scientists young and old have a place and a voice."

As the note on Cordis points out, it is mostly biological material at the moment. But these are early days.