JoVE

The Journal of Visual Experiments (JoVE) is a video-publication for methods in the natural sciences based in Sommerville, MA, USA. It was founded in late 2006 and was the first scientific journal to break away from the traditional print medium to publish mainly using video. Since 2008 it is PubMed-indexed.

Publishing model

JoVE was originally set up as an open access journal but the founders had to change it to a subscription journal to balance costs in 2009. The founder and CEO, Moishe Pritsker, made the following comment: "The reason is simple: we have to survive. To cover costs of our operations, to break even, we have to charge $6,000 per video article. This is to cover costs of the video-production and technological infrastructure for video-publication, which are higher than in traditional text-only publishing. Academic labs cannot pay $6,000 per article, and therefore we have to find other sources to cover the costs." [1]

Publishing costs

In 2013, publication costs were $2400 for standard access and $4200 for open access.[2] It seems that the reductions for producing your own video have been removed, while costs have increased significantly between 2009 and 2013 from $3000 to $4200 (+40%) for the OA option.

In 2009, authors were charged $1,500 per article for video production services ($500 without), and there were open access options: $3,000/article with production services ($2,000 without). [3][4]

Subscription costs

Whereas previously the subscription was for all of JoVE, it is now subdivided by section (General Biology, Neuroscience, Applied Physics, etc.) and institutes have the option to subscribe to one, some or all of these sections. Pricing therefor varies from about $4,000 to $30,000 depending on how much content one is looking for (not including negotiable discounts, as of 2013). For comparison, Springer Protocols subscription is ~24'000€/year while Wiley Current Protocols stands at 19'000€ for just 5 out of 16 packages.

Individual subscription were possible for a brief time in 2009. Currently only institutional subscriptions are available.

In 2009, institutional subscriptions ranged from $1,000 for small colleges to $2,400 for PhD-granting institutions, prices which were in league with other commercial scientific journals [5][6].

From 2006 to 2008 the journal was open access.

Sections

• General Biology (developmental, molecular, environmental, marine, and plant biology, bioinformatics, veterinary medicine, non-pathogenic microbiology)
• Neuroscience (systems neurobiology, electrophysiology, development and neural plasticity, cellular and molecular neurobiology, animal behavioral testing, human and animal brain imaging, psychophysics, neurobiology of disease)
• Immunology & Infection (basic biology of pathogenic bacteria, fungi, parasites, viruses, and infectious prions, biology and roles of vectors in microbe life cycles, in vitro and in vivo modeling of pathogenesis, immune response to infection and tumors, immune cell development, autoimmune responses and diseases, allergic diseases)
• Clinical and Translational Medicine (animal models of diseases, surgical subspecialties, internal medicine, clinical trials, behavioral health, best medical practice, medical and nursing teaching resources)
• Bioengineering (advanced instrumentation, cell and tissue engineering, computational biology, synthetic biology, bio-MEMS and microfluidic devices, nanotechnology, biomimetics and biomaterials)
• Chemistry (organic, inorganic, physical, and analytical chemistry, biochemistry, chemical and molecular biology, novel materials, spectroscopic techniques, molecular self-assembly and recognition)
• Applied Physics
• Behavior
• Environment

Links

• JoVE homepage
• JoVE in the Wikipedia
• all current JoVE articles via PubMed (note that by clicking "free full text", the list can be restricted to open access videos only.)
• Andrew Noske's notes on JoVE from 2011