The development of online video enables bringing the “show me” effect from the laboratory into scientific publication. This idea was at the foundation of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first peer reviewed science journal indexed in PubMed that uses online video as the principal publication format. A typical JoVE article includes a step-by-step video demonstration and a text description of a scientific experiment filmed at the laboratory of a research university. JoVE was founded at the end of 2006, and its headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At this time, JoVE published more than 2,500 video articles filmed by JoVE videographers at universities in 15 different countries including USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Israel, Australia and others. The JoVE video publication covers novel and standard experimental methods in neuroscience, immunology, bioengineering, clinical and translational medicine, behavioral science, applied physics, chemistry and other disciplines. The JoVE website receives more than 3,000,000 unique visitors per year, mainly scientists and students from academic institutions. Since JoVE started its subscription program in 2009, more than 550 universities joined the growing list of institutional subscribers including such leaders as Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, NIH (USA), McGill (Canada), Edinburgh, Cambridge (UK), Frankfurt, Charite Berlin (Germany), Karolinska Institute (Sweden), Weizmann Institute (Israel), Tokyo (Japan), Melbourne (Australia) and many others.
Beyond numbers, the most common comment from JoVE users is: “Why didn’t anybody think of this idea before?” Many users, mainly scientists and students in academic labs, indicate that JoVE video publications save their time, research funds and frustration, as video allows much easier reproduction and learning of experiments than the traditional text-only publication. As the problem of reproducibility draws increasing attention of academics, science funders and policy makers, the testimonials of JoVE users provide evidence that the novel video-based approach to scientific publishing presents a realistic and effective solution to this problem.
Moshe Pritsker is co-founder and CEO of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE.com). He will be speaking at Internet Librarian International 2013.