You have a three-minute video about your latest paper, and maybe an audio version too. You open your faculty profile editor to add it and find a text box for research interests, a photo upload and a field for links. There is no embed button.
That is normal. At many universities the profile is generated by a research information system rather than built in a website editor, and that system decides what you can add. The two university guides below show how this plays out.
What Profile Systems Usually Let You Edit
At the time of writing (October 2026), the University of Bath's guide to updating your profile on Pure is a good example of the limits. You get four text boxes, including research interests, which should be no more than 250 words and written for a wide audience. You can upload gallery images and add links, which show as icons below your photo. The same page says it is currently not possible to embed videos on the profile.
Some universities have two pages for each researcher. The University of Edinburgh's research profile guidance describes a research portal profile fed from Pure, where you can pick highlighted publications, and a separate staff profile page on the university's web system that can pull in Pure records or use a Pure widget that embeds them via HTML.
So the first job is to find out which page people actually land on, which system feeds it, and whether any part of it accepts a URL or HTML. Your research office or library usually knows.
Three Routes That Usually Work
| Route | When it works | What you need | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link from the profile | Almost always, through a links field | A public page or video URL | Visitors leave the profile to watch |
| Embed on a page that takes HTML or a URL | Department or lab pages in a web content system | Embed code or a share URL | You may need a web editor's help |
| Media on a page you control, linked from the profile | When the profile only takes text and links | A lab or personal site | One more page to keep current |
Route 1: link from the profile
If the profile has a links field, use it: pick a link type if the system offers one, and add a description that says what is there. On Bath's Pure profile, for example, links show up as icons below your photo, and a link with no type selected shows as a globe icon.
Route 2: embed where the page accepts it
YouTube's embedding help gives the basic steps: click Share on the video, choose Embed, copy the HTML code and paste it into your page HTML. The same page explains a privacy-enhanced mode: change the embed domain from youtube.com to youtube-nocookie.com, so views of the embedded video are not used to personalize the viewer's YouTube experience.
Many university sites run on WordPress. WashU's guide to embedding video shows the simplest version: paste the plain share URL into the page editor, and WordPress switches to the right block. It also recommends against uploading video files directly to the site because of hosting, loading and performance issues.
Route 3: put the media where you have control
If neither of the first two gives you what you need, make a page for the paper on your lab or personal site, put the video and audio there, and link to it from the profile. If you already maintain a lab site, this guide to a publications page people read covers how to lay each entry out.
A Worked Setup for One Paper
Say you are a life sciences researcher with a new paper, a short video about it and an audio version. Here is an order that avoids rework.
- Ask your research office which system feeds your public profile, and whether there is a separate department page you can edit.
- Rewrite your research description in plain English, and stay inside any limit your university sets (Bath's is 250 words for research interests).
- If the profile lets you highlight publications, highlight this paper.
- Put the video and audio on one page that accepts HTML or a URL: a department page, a lab page or a personal site.
- Add a short text summary of the paper next to the media, so people who cannot watch or listen still get the point.
- Add a link from your profile to that page, with a description that says what is there, such as "Video and audio summary of our 2026 paper".
- Open your profile as a visitor would, in a private browser window, and follow the link to check it plays.
Audio is the format people forget. Treat it exactly like the video: the same page, the same link, with the text summary beside it.
Where Amplify Fits
Amplify makes the media for one paper from the PDF you upload: a video abstract of about 3 minutes, a 45 to 60 second vertical short, an audio brief in English plus 21 more languages on request, and a one-page infographic. A person reviews every format, and nothing publishes until you approve it.
The part that matters for profile pages is the embeddable widget: one script tag per page, one marker per paper. It works anywhere you can paste HTML, including a faculty profile, lab site or publication list, and it carries the summaries, the audio brief, the video and the infographic. Readers can read, listen and ask questions about the paper without leaving the page.
If your profile system does not allow embeds, as with the Pure profile described above, put the widget on a page where you can paste HTML and link to it from your profile. The analytics (reads, listens, questions asked, languages, and which format moved people) are included in the per-paper price.
Make the Profile a Signpost
Your profile may never hold a video player, and that is fine. What matters is that someone who lands on it can reach your paper's video and audio in one click.
See how Amplify puts one paper's video and audio on your page
