Say It With Video

If you’re one of the more than 1,000,000 scientists, practitioners, educators, or students from around the world who regularly read Communications of the ACM in print or online, you may have noticed that a new feature has recently been introduced on the magazine’s Web site—video. Since January, ACM has been adding author or media-generated videos to the main landing page of the site (also accessible via the Abstracts tab in the ACM Digital Library). Thus far, these videos have highlighted solely the work of the cover stories, but based on the initial success of these videos and the decision of Communications’ Web Board, over the coming months we will be expanding the number of videos posted on the site each month and creating a video archive to make these videos easily accessible for our readers and viewers. This archive will go live along with the launch of the new Communications Web site later this summer.

Based on our own experience and that of other scholarly publishers, publishing article-oriented videos that focus on articles published in the magazine increases interest in the articles themselves, improves readability, and creates an overall new and powerful experience for users that enhances the value they derive from the publication in general. Not surprisingly, the amount of time each viewer spends with each article tends to increase and the content itself becomes more approachable in the video format. The challenge for our authors is to develop high-quality video content that makes full-length articles appealing to our broad readership. The challenge for ACM is to make sure the Communications Web site does not become a digital warehouse for all computing-related videos that tries to compete with the likes of YouTube or Facebook, and to make sure these videos are viewable on the full range of screens out there from desktops to tablets to smartphones. For our viewers, it is important they know the same level of editorial selection exists for this growing video archive as for full-length published articles, and that this supplemental material will be directly relevant to the content published in the magazine. Communications’ focus continues to be on quality versus quantity, and this new video archive will be consistent with that philosophy.

So, if you’ve submitted an article to Communications’ Editorial Board and your article has been accepted, please contact us as soon as possible to start planning the creation of your video. Doing so is fast becoming an important way to communicate your work to the community and it is a great way to increase your work’s exposure to Communications’ large and global readership.

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