The founder of a new video-based biology journal talks about how video can make experimental work easier and how it should be the future of scientific publishing.

Caitlin Stier

Progress in biology depends on the ability of scientists to repeat each other’s experiments. But as any bench scientist can attest, following written protocols is no guarantee for success.

Moshe Pritsker says he has a solution. He’s the editor-in-chief and cofounder of the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), a new online journal of videos showing researchers carrying out various experimental procedures step by step. Pritsker wants his journal to make biological research more reproducible and transparent. He believes in JoVE so much that he left his postdoctoral position at Massachusetts General Hospital earlier this year to devote himself full-time to the journal.

_Moshe Pritsker says online journal articles should have a methods section in video format. _

Based in Cambridge, Pritsker and his team have put out four issues since starting the journal last year. He recently sat down with Nature Network Boston to talk about his experiences launching JoVE and his hopes for its future.

What was your inspiration behind the Journal of Visualized Experiments?

It came out of personal pain as a scientist. When you try to repeat experiments you read published studies, the methods and materials section and sometimes printed protocols. You can spend from a few days to a few weeks and sometimes a few months and you may never be able to repeat an experiment. I think this is one reason why biology is so difficult. So the idea was to increase the reproducibility of experiments and for that you need to increase the transparency of the research. The details of the experiments are not always reflected in the printed publications and you’re not always lucky enough to have people to show you how to do it.

We can argue about whether video is going to solve all the problems related to transparency and reproducibility in biology, but if I am able to improve it by, say, 40 percent with this journal, I will be very happy.

How has the response been? Do you receive a lot of videos?

We really need more videos; we’ve realized that this journal will probably not be based on people submitting videos themselves, because you have to have a certain level of expertise in video filming and editing. I don’t expect that many scientists will learn how to make high-quality videos.

To jump-start this process, we get technical help from professional videographers with biology degrees or a biology background. When we decide that we are interested in the experiments of a particular lab, we contact them and then we send a professional videographer to the lab. We also invite suggestions from scientists and we are happy to take care of the filming and editing for them.

Just before we started JoVE, I spoke with people at conferences and asked them, “Would it be useful to have a video publication in science and would you be interested in participating?” Ninety percent would answer ‘Yes, it’s very useful and it should’ve have been done a long time ago.’ But whether [they] would be willing to participate? I think some people hesitate to expose their work like that.

How are submissions reviewed?

We have an editorial board and on top of that we have a few editors, PhD level people, who are experts in specific fields. So every time we have a new video, one of these people watches it to make sure that everything looks OK. We don’t yet have an established, rigid system of peer review, where we send videos out to external reviewers, simply because we don’t have enough submissions yet. When we start receiving more submissions or producing more videos, then our review process will become more similar to traditional peer review.

You were a postdoc when you started all of this. How did you manage the journal in the beginning?

I spent one year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital. I had been thinking about the idea of a video-based publication for a few years. At the end of my first year as a postdoc, I realized that I needed to implement this idea.

In the beginning it was all volunteer work because we didn’t have any money. I had to go through the entire process of making a video of an experiment and editing and everything by myself. Actually that was very helpful because then I learned the process and the difficulties.

Why did you decide to go full-time?

I realized I needed to be full-time for the journal to become successful. This is the first video publication on biological research so I realized it was not going to be easy and that it would require a lot of trial and error.

It was a little risky because we had not yet secured any funding, so I worked without a salary. But I decided to take this risk because I believed the idea of JoVE deserved a chance. Two months later, we were lucky to get investment from an angel investor.

Has there been any resistance from scientists who don’t want to share their techniques on video or who worry about being scooped?

On the one hand, you can think about competition in science as a reason for people to hide their research. On the other hand, if someone cannot repeat your published experiment, that hurts your credibility as a researcher. What I’ve found is that people who are known for high-quality experiments are willing to contribute more because they are interested in the distribution of this knowledge and to assert that they know how to do good experiments. So this is a way to increase the credibility of the research by increasing transparency.

Are you worried about competition from other journals?

Am I envisioning that one day we will have competition? Yes. Am I worried about it? No. I think that video in general will become, if not the dominant part, then a very important part of the scientific publication, not because it’s hype or cool. The reason to do video is because it’s supposed to help break this block in the biology: how do I repeat experiments? How do I make biology easier, less frustrating, more efficient?

What would be good is to combine a traditional print publication with our approach. You’d have every print article supplemented with a materials and methods section on video. We will be looking for some collaborations in that area.