LOS ANGELES: Haim Weizman is a chemist by trade and an Internet moviemaker on the side.

In his first video, a telegenic narrator in a lab coat swirls a flask as electronic music plays in the background. Created by four science and film students at the University of California at San Diego, the video shows a typical recrystallisation experiment straight out of Chemistry 101.

The six-minute epic complete with bloopers got 1,205 views on Google Inc.’s YouTube, but the number increased fourfold when the video was posted to SciVee, one of a number of online video-sharing startups designed to let scientists broadcast themselves toiling in the laboratory or delivering lectures.

Fans of the niche sites say they help the public — and students — understand the scientific process, allow researchers to duplicate one another’s results and may help discourage fraud.

“Anyone in an organic chemistry class anywhere can now perform this experiment by watching the video. There are so many details that it’s hard to describe in a lab manual,” said Weizman, a lecturer at UC San Diego. He went on to produce five more lab-training videos.

Researchers who are uploading their experiments and lectures online are discovering filmmaking is more art than science. If the narrators are boring or the image is shaky, viewers will quickly learn to click elsewhere.

“Scientists are not moviemakers so getting them to shoot their experiments and describe them properly can be a challenge,” said Anton Denissov, a broadband video analyst with the Yankee Group.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, SciVee encourages scholars with a paper hot off the press to make a short video called a ‘pubcast’ highlighting the key points. It also accepts unsolicited submissions that have no connection to any published work.

Phil Bourne, a pharmacologist at UC San Diego, launched SciVee this summer after seeing his students hooked on YouTube. Bourne wanted a reputable virtual place where researchers could trade techniques without the potpourri of topics found on general video-sharing sites.

“It’s quite a quantum leap for scientists to present their research in this way,” Bourne said.

The age-old practice of reporting scientific results in peer-reviewed journals or at scientific conferences isn’t going away soon. Most journals with online editions are taking a wait-and-see approach about YouTube-type videos, although many routinely add podcasts and other media to accompany papers.

“This is an area we’re extremely interested in, but we’re still in the embryonic stage,” said Stewart Wills, online editor of the journal Science.

One of the startup sites — called JoVE, short for the Journal of Visualised Experiments — is the digital mirror to traditional scientific journals, however.

Created last year by a former Harvard postdoctoral student with help from an angel investor, the site has stringent publication rules. On the recommendation of its editorial panel, it dispatches professional videographers to labs around the world doing interesting work. Their footage is edited and approved by the researchers before being posted.

Some experts say the biggest advantage to science videos is making research more accessible to non-scientists. There’s no guarantee that video can’t be manipulated, but the medium also may force scientists to think twice before committing fraud.

“It’s one thing to put your name on a fake paper and it’s another to make a fake video that your friends and family could watch,” said John B. Horrigan, associate director for research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.—AP