For most of scientists and engineers, publishing in academic journals and presenting at professional conferences are the two most dominant outlets for sharing research with colleagues. The advantages of conference presentations are obvious. Often very colorful, offering face-to-face communication, conference presentations can instantly capture an audience’s attention. The disadvantages of conference presentations, on the other hand, are their short lifetime and limited audience. In most cases, only conference attendees can enjoy presentation materials, and only during a conference. While many of today’s conferences have their own websites, the majority of conference websites provide only limited content: the titles of presentations and the names of presenters, often without even an abstract.
While organizations are increasingly beginning to provide presentation materials online post-conference, such materials often come and go quickly. Current conference organizing systems have not proved suitable in that they fail to give presentations credit for potential long-term impact. Thus, conference presenters are left to credit their own presentations by listing them in their curriculum vitae or by referring to them in journal publications. Unfortunately, such presentation materials, even though cited, are in most cases no longer available for review.
OAtube Nanotechnology, the first ever video journal indexed and/or abstracted in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), is founded on the premise that many conference presentations do have long-term impact, being the sources for future discovery. Thus, the oatube journal aims to archive them in a new form. OAtube Nanotechnology is a new kind of scientific journal, a royal representative of conference presentations containing journal-style citation information about presentations as a resource for other researchers. Authors keep the copyright of their journal articles. This new kind of journal only provides an open-access approach for conference presentations to reach the widest possible audience through the Internet.
