Despite some limitations, Underline Science is a one-of-a-kind resource, offering access to a large library of high-quality videos of scientific lectures and discussions through a simple interface.
Launched in 2019, Underline Science is a video platform that provides access to scientific conference presentations, lectures, and panel discussions from around the world. Primarily aimed at scientists and researchers, Underline also offers valuable resources for librarians and event organizers.
Calling itself “Netflix for researchers and professionals” (Underline, n.d.), Underline is the first video repository designed specifically for scientific lectures. The platform features more than 55,000 videos in four categories—engineering and technology, health sciences, life sciences, and social sciences—from leading organizations, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and a smaller number produced by Underline itself. Content is updated weekly. Presentations can be searched, shared, and cited with a DOI. Each video also includes a transcript, closed captions, bookmarking, links to related sources, and author information.
From the top navigation menu on the homepage, users can select the “library” dropdown to browse or search the platform’s content via five options (Figure 1).
From “societies,” the user can access an information page for each organization that has supplied content to the platform, which includes a description of the organization, a list of its recent events, and a link to its website.
“Past conferences” shows the location, ticket prices, schedule, speakers, sessions, sponsors and exhibitors, and conference announcements for conferences aggregated or hosted by the platform.
“Speakers” shows a list of speakers who have paid to add their own lectures to Underline’s library.
Clicking on “presentations” opens the digital video library, where users can search for individual presentations using keywords and filter by subject, society, content type, and release year (Figure 2).
I tried the subject filter, selecting Machine Learning, and, from the results, chose a presentation titled “Early Detection of Kidney Disease in Aging Diabetic Populations Using Machine Learning,” by Julia Gorodilova, presented at the conference “Aging Powerfully: AI Blueprint for Chronic Disease Management and Social Determinants of Longevity” in July 2025. As I watched the video, I was able to follow along with the English transcript located to its right (Figure 3).
I also tried searching within the presentation for the word “diabetic,” which yielded 10 results throughout the video and poster (Figure 4).
Clicking on “originals” leads to a set of video lectures produced by Underline, featuring acclaimed scientists—Miroslav Radman, a molecular biologist and geneticist focused on aging, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a leader in robotics, and Rich Roberts and Adrian Krainer, who have completed transformative research on RNA splicing. For each, 6 to 8 episodes provide deep insights into the researcher’s work (Figure 5). This content is only accessible with a paid subscription.
The “solutions” dropdown links to the platform’s administrative tools: Under “event organizers,” users can find information about Underline’s conference planning service. A section for “librarians” provides an overview of the platform’s features and directs users to the Librarian Resource Center, which includes the current title list and MARC records, accessibility information, and COUNTER 5 reports. The Librarian Resource Center also features an open-access portal containing video resources specifically for librarians.
Finally, under “researchers,” users can, for $19.95 per video, submit a conference presentation to Underline Science for inclusion in the digital video library (Underline, n.d.).
The platform meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA and is VPAT 508 compliant.
Underline Science offers limited free access to lectures, presentations, and videos. Some video content, including the “Originals” series, is only accessible to subscribers. For premium content, a monthly individual subscription is available for $9.99 or a pay-per-view option for $4.99. Although Underline doesn’t make the pricing for institutional access public, a quote of $8,000 that Underline provided for my institution struck me as affordable and a good value for the content.
MARC records are publicly available via the Librarian Resource Center. COUNTER5 reports are available to subscribers.
Authentication can be acquired through a username and password or with a Google account.
There is no direct competitor to Underline Science.
Similar to scholarly databases—such as Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science—Underline offers a robust collection of science-focused scholarly content targeting scientists, researchers, and higher education professionals. While the databases are an important resource for users conducting scientific research, tracking citations, and gathering information for literature reviews, Underline Science offers audiovisual content that sets it apart. Scopus, for example, indexes conference proceedings as well as journal articles, but it does not provide the actual video presentations (Elsevier, n.d.).
Like Underline, sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu allow researchers to share their presentations and papers. These platforms, however, are self-archived, lack organization and standardization, are prone to scams in the form of fake journals, publishers, and impact ratings, and do not guarantee wider visibility. Users can also upload scientific presentations to video archive platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. These platforms are user-friendly, allow simple account creation, are widely accessible to the public, can often generate transcripts, provide monetization opportunities, and support various online academic communities. But they typically lack scholarly database features, such as unified cataloging and indexing, citations, consistent and accurate transcripts, and permalinks. It can also be difficult for researchers to locate specific scientific content and determine the accuracy of the videos they come across.
Institutional repositories contain journal articles as well as conference proceedings. They can improve citation counts and exposure, but conference proceedings are often published as written abstracts, omitting graphics found in physical posters (Demetres et al., 2020). Underline, on the other hand, is specifically designed to store a conference’s audio and visual content.
By combining the features of scholarly databases with those of video archive sites, Underline Science has created a distinct academic platform.
Underline Science contains high-quality content that is organized, unified, and easily searchable; the platform also promotes diversity by highlighting work by researchers from various backgrounds. While a substantial amount of content is available for free, making a paid subscription seem unnecessary for casual users, for users requiring deeper access, the pricing is reasonable.
Despite its great features, Underline has some limitations. The transcripts and captions are available only in English, creating a language barrier for non-English speakers. The citation formats—which appear to be a modified version of the Harvard and Vancouver styles—are inconsistent.
The search navigation features could also be improved. Instead of semantic searching, the platform uses traditional keyword searching—for example, searching “AI” will yield different results from searching “artificial intelligence,” without any overlap. There is no “back to search results” option, and when users navigate back via the browser back button, they are returned to the top of the results list rather than to their previous position. The platform also lacks a search history feature, so users have to remember the terms and filters for their search queries.
Incorporating features such as search history, Boolean operators, semantic and natural language searching, multilingual transcripts and captions, and a “back to results” option would significantly improve the platform’s search process.
Underline’s greatest strength is its uniqueness. It is currently the only video platform designed specifically to share scientific research.
Underline Science presents scientists, researchers, educators, and students with a unique opportunity to access and share research in video format. Although it has limited search features, citation inconsistencies, and language barriers, the accessibility, quality, and quantity of its content, along with its simple interface and affordable pricing, strongly outweigh these disadvantages.
Demetres, M. R., Delgado, D., & Wright, D. N. (2020). The impact of institutional repositories: a systematic review. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 108(2), 177–184. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2020.856
Elsevier. (n.d.). Scopus content. Elsevier. Retrieved September 28, 2025, from https://www.elsevier.com/products/scopus/content#3-selection-standards
Underline. (n.d.). Underline. Underline Science. Retrieved August 8, 2025, from https://underline.io/
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