Embracing Videos in Scholarly Publishing: The IOP Publishing Experience

In scholarly publishing video content has emerged in recent years as a way of conveying results beyond the written article. In 2010 New Journal of Physics started a pilot project on “video abstracts” as a means to innovate and offer authors opportunities to showcase their work. Today other IOP Publishing journals also offer this option to authors. IOP Publishing’s e-book programme also has adopted video abstracts and includes embedded video and multimedia in the e-books themselves. Physics World, the magazine of the Institute of Physics, has been publishing videos since 2009. The magazine has evolved its video outputs to reflect the diverse ways that audiences are consuming video online and in other digital formats. This paper provides a tour of the IOP Publishing video programme, explaining how academics and publishers can benefit from embracing video, and speculating on what the future holds for this content stream.