Photograph by Mark Mahaney
If they can get the money, scientists will travel around the world to learn new techniques. If they can't, they may waste years trying to reproduce published experiments, missing crucial sleights of hand that are invisible in the journal articles. As far as experiments are concerned, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie could be worth millions. To solve this problem, Moshe Pritsker conceived of and cofounded the first peer-reviewed online video journal, JoVE. As a graduate student at Princeton and a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, Pritsker was astounded by the amount of time wasted trying to follow published procedures, especially when techniques involved delicate manipulation. The complexity of science was getting ahead of scientists' ability to describe it on paper, he surmised after jetting to Scotland to learn a technique. "This was a ridiculous situation," he says. < Back | Continue >
Some scientists tried to post videos of their techniques online, but they did not have the skill or the time to create films that really did the job. And there was no incentive to invest resources in this new medium. When Pritsker and his partners, CTO Nikita Bernstein and CFO Klaus Korak, teamed up to found the Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE, they recognized two important things: that scientists could not be the ones to make the videos, and that the best incentive to post a video is to make it count as a publication. They assembled a team of videographers in 30 cities and five countries — the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Japan — to make it easy for scientists to have their work recorded. And they brought together all the accoutrements of a journal — a board of editors, a peer-review system — to give the videos the integrity and quality of any journal article. < Back | Continue >
The biggest hurdles, Pritsker says, have not been technical. "The beginning was very difficult," he says, referring to garnering early submissions and struggling to gain momentum after the 2006 launch. It took a lot of reaching out to get the first few big-name labs, whose participation spurred JoVE's current success. But scientists have increasingly seen the utility of spreading techniques through video, and Pritsker receives constant emails from thrilled researchers. Now, with more than 275 videos posted and indexed on PubMed and MEDLINE and a partnership with Wiley-Blackwell's Current Protocols journal, JoVE is gaining momentum toward Pritsker's goal of a video for "every possible biological procedure" — and a world where science travels faster than ever. < Back | Continue >
