This short paper provides information about the visibility of licensing information on video upload sites used by academics with a focus on Creative Commons licenses.

1. Isabelle BrentC-SAP, University of BirminghamJune 2011<br />Notes on Visibility of Licensing in Video Uploading Sites<br />Licensing visibilitySearchable by license?DownloadableEmbed code tagsReview featuresWeb2 featuresAllows uploads?NotesYouTubeUnclear. Can use CCnoNoyesVariableNo subcategoriesCommentsyesyesVimeoCan license inc. CCnosomeyesVariableNo subcategoriesComments (disabled is many videos)Staff picksyesyesTEDCCAll CCYesyesGood. Several categoriesComments yes - lotsnoMost extensive use of Web2Videolectures.netCCAll CCNoyes Good Peer reviewCommentsStar systemyesnoMainly scienceShows number of viewsMethodSpaceNo infonosomeyesvariableCommentsStar systemyesYesSocial science methodsShows number of viewsiTunesUCC No?somenonononoYesInstitutional uploads<br />YouTube<br />www.youtube.com<br />The most popular video sharing platform and the most integrated with other social networking applications. Videos are limited to 15 minutes unless uploaders are part of the YouTube Partner Program (in which case there is a 20GB limit). YouTube is unclear about licensing; in 2009 they announced that they were testing an option giving video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons (C.C.) licenses. The test included a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. The screenshot shows a video from Berkeley with a Creative Commons license. <br />Some users include a Creative Commons at the end of videos or in the additional information section below. YouTube announced at the beginning of June (2011) that it has enabled users to add a C.C. license to their videos and to search for C.C. licensed videos. Currently the search is only available within the video editor and the only license available is CC by 3 which allows for commercial use. <br />Academic videos are classified in the category of education but there are no further subcategories. YouTube.edu has further subcategories but does not have a large amount of videos (for example there are 100 for social sciences). Searches are reliant on keywords in the title since tags are applied in an inconsistent manner (e.g. uploaders often split up tag phrases into individual words which loses the meaning of tags). <br />VIMEO<br />http://vimeo.com/<br />Similar to YouTube but smaller scale and does not have commercial content. It has an attractive user-interface with easy to spot tags. It is possible to browse through categories which then show a group of related tags. However there is no specific category for education. The categories reflect interests associated with charities and creative industries. <br />The use of tags (with academic videos) is variable; half of the academic videos reviewed had no information in this section. The site does not use tag clouds and treats tags much the same way as YouTube. <br />Vimeo has recently enabled contributors to attach a CC license to videos (shown in the screenshot below) and has a desktop uploader to make contributing videos easier. Two accounts are available for users; the basic free service allows 500MB of videos to be uploaded a week and the plus account allows 5GB a week.<br />Video-lectures.net<br />http://videolectures.net/<br />VideoLectures.net is a free and open access educational video lectures repository. The site has a science focus and contains lectures filmed at conferences, summer schools and workshops. The portal is aimed at ‘promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public’. <br />Videolectures.net does not accept uploads and has some sort of peer review process. The user-interface is good and it is possible to drill down through a range of tag clouds to get specific resources. In addition to the lectures, some videos have a range of accompanying materials such as PDF versions of the presentation and related academic papers. <br />Registered users are able to make comments and rate videos and figures are given for numbers of views. There is a standard option to share the video on a range of sites and an option to ‘like’ the page on Facebook. <br />There is an option to ‘turn out the lights’ (dim the rest of the screen) in order to watch the videos and easy access to the html code to embed the video in another website.<br />In the screenshot below one can see the ‘Related Content’ which is beneath the supplementary materials available. This consists of three tabs; the first shows videos that other users have watched, the second tab contains a history of videos the individual has watched and the third shows other videos by the same author.<br />MethodSpace<br />MethodSpace has recently improved its video section and currently has 56 videos. Registered users are able to upload videos to the site (though currently most videos have been supplied by the website staff). Currently most videos are taken from other sources such as NCRM and YouTube but users can upload their own produced videos. There is a search feature for the videos and an RSS feed for new material.<br />MethodSpace has added their own user-rating system and number of views a video has received together with the uploader and upload date (see screenshot below) <br />iTunesU<br />ITunesU is slightly different from the other sites reviewed because video can’t be embedded within another site and the user needs iTunes installed on their computer to access materials. No use is made of tagging and searches are through keywords in the title or description. The iTunesU initiative has gathered support from a number of academic institutions and some institutions like Oxford are using the CC license with some of their materials. However, the CC is not common and there is no specific section for licensing information. Searches cannot be restricted to CC licensed materials.<br />