I couldn’t find one guy putting Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. There are no videos of giddy college students decorating a drunk roommate. And no one wants to scream in defense of the wounded pop diva and tell us to “leave Britney alone.”

 

We’re not in YouTube land anymore, Toto.

 

Welcome to the Journal of Visualized Experiments or JoVE.com, a very sober website. Though on its face it may evoke thoughts of a variety of websites where users post video, JoVE is more than geek chic for the lab set. The website, which features researchers demonstrating actual experiments on video, is meant to address what JoVE founder Moshe Pritsker argues is a significant problem for both academic and industry researchers that sucks time and energy into a “a systemic black hole.”

 

Pritsker said the idea of JoVE emerged from his own frustrations from trying for months to reproduce experiments—detailed in journal publications—that had been performed years and years before. The idea for JoVE came to him while working on as a post doc at Harvard Medical School in neuroscience lab.

“The problem that scientist run into everyday is lack of reproducibility of biological experiments,” he said. “If you have done an experiment in your laboratory and describe it in a reputable scientific literature, I’m supposed to reproduce it relatively easy.”

 

In reality, Pritsker said that’s not the case in biology. Typically, he said, scientists read a materials and methods section of a study and can spend months struggling to reproduce the results. The reason, he said, is that scientific experiments are complex and it is impossible to reflect all the small details in text. Often, what details are there, are misinterpreted.

 

“It’s similar to cooking. When you try to reproduce a Chinese dish from a written recipe, what’s the chance the dish you cook will taste the same as the one cooked in Shanghai? The first time, very little,” he said. “What you will do is repeat it again and again and again until you reach that authentic taste you tried to do.”

 

Launched at the end of 2006 with just six videos and $1.5 million in angel capital, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based JoVE is a for-profit endeavor. It is free to view the website, which is advertising supported. Pritsker said about 1,000 people come on to the site each day and it has 70,000 page views a month.

Realizing that most scientists may not have the tools or skills to produce and edit video, JoVE takes care of all the filming and production. The company has four full-time employees, but established a network of contractors in 30 cities throughout the world to film and edit. This approach also provides quality control and ensures the videos are edited in a way that a viewer will be able to understand how to perform a procedure through a short film.

 

“It’s good if you are able to make videos that are both technically clear and engaging and emotionally interesting, but the technical clarity and technical value is most important,” said Pritsker.

 

Pritsker acknowledges it’s taken some effort to sell scientists on the idea. In fact, one reason he decided on the “Journal of Visualized Experiments” name rather than on the “Database of Visualized Experiments” was because of the publish-or-perish dictum of the academic world. Contributors can cite the journal in their CVs. “Publication is the currency of science,” he said, “and we become part of that currency.” It publishes monthly and has assembled an editorial board consisting of researchers from Harvard, Princeton, the National Institutes of Health, and elsewhere.

 

In an effort to expand its base of contributors, JoVE has begun forming alliances with journal publishers. It just announced that John Wiley, a global 200-year old scientific publisher, has entered into a partnership for production of online video-publication. The partnership will enhance articles published in Wiley’s Current Protocols, 14 comprehensive titles spanning the life sciences, with video demonstrations of experimental procedures.

 

Wiley will pay for the production of the videos, which will be posted on both Wiley and JoVE sites. They plan to produce and publish 200 videos online during the first year. JoVE expects to announce to other similar agreements shortly.

 

With titles like “A Method for 2-Photon Imaging of Blood Flow in the Neocortex through a Cranial Window,” some academics void of telegenic qualities, and an occasional ick factor of open-brain surgery on rats, JoVE may never pose a threat to YouTube.

 

But Pritsker thinks beyond speeding up drug discovery by making experiments more reproducible for both academics and industry researchers, a lay audience may benefit from seeing how research is performed to bring a little more intelligent discourse around matters of controversy, such as stem cell research. 

 

“When you see how something is actually done,” he said, “oftentimes subjects are perceived in a different way.”