Video Journal Designed for Biologic and Biomedical Researchers

Some have speculated that the video scientific journal will eventually replace the traditional text-only publishing.

Scientists frequently learn new technologies by reading and reproducing research works of their colleagues published in science journals. Every bench scientist is familiar with the complexity of reproducing biologic experiments based on their text descriptions in conventional scientific journals. This is because it is virtually impossible for scientists to explain the huge number of seemingly inconsequential aspects of an experiment that must be duplicated in order to reproduce its results. Even if they had the time, researchers would probably not bother to document many of these nuances because they have an established practice of protocol at their lab.

To a researcher working in a different lab with different practices or to someone who is not familiar with the field of investigation, these details can often mean the difference between success and failure. As a result, the time that it takes a scientist to reproduce an experiment can range from between a few weeks to a few months. Consequently, a large portion of biomedical research budgets, including the US$31 billion annual budget of the US National Institute of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA), subsidizes the time-consuming process of learning and relearning research techniques instead of exploring new breakthrough discoveries. This makes academic research and development of new therapies slow and costly.

Dr. Moshe Pritsker, the cofounder of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE; Cambridge, MA, USA), received first-hand experience with this phenomenon when he was a PhD student at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ, USA) working on stem cells. Dr. Pritsker was asked to reconstruct a way of culturing embryonic stem cells that had been reported by researchers in Edinburgh, UK. He tried following the steps in the article but could not get the experiment to succeed. His lab flew him to Edinburgh to spend two weeks with the group that had invented the method so they could visually demonstrate it to him. After that experience, Dr. Pritsker was able to replicate the experiment. But he recognized that the long and expensive trip would not have been necessary if only he had been able to watch the experimenters.

Dr. Pritsker developed the idea of creating a journal to provide step-by-step video demonstrations of experimental techniques and procedures. Following a short period of postdoctorate training at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA), Dr. Pritsker, together with his two friends, Nikita Bernstein and Klaus Korak, founded JoVE at the end of 2006. JoVE presents detailed descriptions of advanced research methods in videos that are filmed by an international network of trained camera operators. Each video is published together with a text article, which is similar to an article in conventional text-only methodology journals such as Nature Protocols or Biotechniques. Videos are filmed in laboratories of leading research universities in the United States and Europe. All JoVE articles are peer-reviewed to ensure the scientific quality, applicability, and technical clarity of the methods that are presented.

Visualization through video improves the transparency and reproducibility of biologic research and reduces the amount of time and expense required to learn new experimental techniques. The concept of the video journal also opens a new boundary in scientific publication by visualizing the change over time integral to many life science experiments.

Since its foundation in 2006, JoVE has is a scientific publishing company with 40 employees and sales projected to exceed US$5 million in 2011. As of October 2011, JoVE publishes 50 video articles per month, and the total number of articles published exceeds 1,300. Currently nearly 350 leading international academic institutions subscribe to JoVE.

Related Links:
Journal of Visualized Experiments