Monthly Archives: October 2011

JoVE Goes Back to Harvard

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On Monday our CEO, Moshe Pritsker, went to Harvard University to demonstrate JoVE at an “eScience” workshop co-hosted by Microsoft.

The workshop featured live demonstrations of 20 technologies that could enhance scientific research. The Harvard Crimson covered the workshop and focused on JoVE:

“eScience” Is New Frontier

“We think the traditional paper-format research publication is very unproductive,” Pritsker said.

“People can get lost reading the content they are not familiar with,” he said.

Pritsker said the platform has three parts—introduction, animation and experimental procedures—corresponding to the abstract, experimental design, description of the results, and other components found in a conventional research paper. With JoVe, scientists can more easily communicate temporal aspects of their results, such as change in a given metric over time—a result integral to many life science experiments.

“We think JoVe can overcome the inherent limitations of traditional, static print journals, thereby adding an entirely new parameter to the communication of experimental data and research results,” Pritsker said.

To read the entire article, please click here.

JoVE Goes to Grade School

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We are pleased to announce that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is the first post-secondary school to subscribe to JoVE.

Though JoVE  has video articles showing basic experimental procedures, the majority of the content showcases cutting edge technology out of Ivy League schools— not the level of research one would usually associate with the high school curriculum.

“We’re just not your typical high school,” explains Dr. Andrea Cobb, Lab Director at Jefferson, listing off some of their equipment, “we have a DNA sequencer, mammalian cell culture facilities, we just got environmental growth culture facilities. We have a lot of toys. Stuff I didn’t even have when I was in grad school.”

Dr. Cobb, who teaches both biotechnology and microbiology at Jefferson, requested a subscription to JoVE because she thinks it will help her students learn to use the schools advanced equipment.

“This way they can see a procedure and practice it over and over again,” she said. “A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand teachers.”

To read the full press release, please click here.

The Importance of Visualizing Information

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On Wednesday, Andrew Revkin, who writes The New York Times blog Dot Earth, wrote a post about using visualization to absorb information. He issues a challenge to his readers and uses JoVE to illustrate the trend:

Fostering Insights be Engaging the Whole Brain

I put out the challenge there (and now repeat it here) to young data-visualization wizards to find ways to envision, literally, that vague but vital concept called public health.

There are signs of progress in this area.

When the New England Journal of Medicine uses an animated data set to convey shifting patterns of obesity in a community, you know something’s afoot. Now there’s a peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, devoted to conveying findings and methods using video.

To read the entire post, please click here.

Studying Traumatic Brain Injury

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New research published in JoVE demonstrates a novel technique for studying traumatic brain injury (TBI) at the cellular (neuronal) level.

Known as the “signature disease” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Institute of Medicine, the number of military service members diagnosed with TBI has nearly tripled from 2000 to 2010— from just under 11,000 cases to more than 30,700 cases.

Click the neurons to see the full experimental procedure.

Few treatments have proven effective, leaving scientists scrambling to develop new methods of understanding the condition.

To help study how neurons are affected by short durations of pressure, similar to that of a shockwave blast, researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have developed a cell pressurization device that applies single pressure pulses to neurons.

So far they have discovered that even very quick pulses of pressure can cause significant cell damage.

“This method can help answer key questions in the TBI, traumatic brain injury field,” said paper author Jung Yul Lim, “such as the threshold for neural cell death or injury.”

To see the full article, please click here.

JoVE Partners with Zeiss

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We are pleased to announce that JoVE will partner with Carl Zeiss Microscopy to support sharing scientific information through open access.

Zeiss, a world-leading manufacturer of microscope technology, will sponsor the publication of three open access video articles, which will be filmed and edited by the JoVE team.

Though the cost of the video is being sponsored, the final articles will undergo the same rigorous peer-review process as other JoVE content.

Click here to see a sample video article.

“Because these videos will be open to the public, this partnership with Zeiss will enable access to content that otherwise wouldn’t be available,” said Dr. Phill Jones, Editorial Director at JoVE.

Video publication is especially effective for demonstration of microscopy research techniques.

“As learning new techniques from written protocols can be challenging, Carl Zeiss Microscopy launched a campaign to support publication of a select number of microscropy protocols in JoVE,” said Strategic Marketing Manager at Zeiss, Dr. Maya Everett.

“Our goal is both to support our customers who wish to publish in this video format as well as provide important training tools to scientists who are new to these techniques.”

To read the full press release, please click here.

This Month in JoVE

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Want a preview what’s happening in JoVE?

In the October 2011 issue, we follow researchers into the Atlantic ocean as they study the movement of jellyfish in their natural environment. Over in Graz, Austria, scientists use an electron microscope to analyze the how a viral infection can change the structure of a leaf.

Click on the jellyfish to watch "This Month in Jove"

Back in California, researchers measure the cognitive impairments in rats treated with radiotherapy, or x-ray treatment. Radiotherapy is given to a person’s head to prevent or delay the spread of cancer to the brain, and the cognitive impairments in rats are similar to those found in cancer survivors.

Also in California, scientists demonstrate how to genetically manipulate human induced pluripotent stem cells— cells that can develop into any adult cell type.

In addition to the video articles featured in the video, this month JoVE will also present methods for measuring physical responses from people under stress, tracking the bursting of bacteria following infection, and visualizing the olfactory bulb through a window in the cranium.

Please note that this posts links to some articles that are not yet published. Keep checking back to see new articles throughout the month!

Steve Jobs, Visionary

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An excerpt from Steve Job‘s 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

JoVE for the Developing World

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Word that JoVE will now be offering free subscriptions to institutions in the developing world is making its way around the globe!

Award-winning science writer David Bradley, who is based in Cambridge, UK, recently wrote about JoVE on his blog Sciencebase:

JoVE Around the World

JoVE is hoping to address scientific information inequality across the globe and has now made free subscriptions to Journal of Visualized Experiments through the HINARI initiative to developing nations in South America, Asia and Africa.

JoVE was originally developed to increase productivity in biological research, and is the only science video journal indexed in PubMed so far. The journali publishes video articles demonstrating advanced experiments performed in major laboratories (including Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale).

According to it creators: “Seeing experiments, rather than translating text, saves scientists and students time and money when learning new research techniques.” They add that, “Access to this visual content is especially important in developing countries.”

JoVE for the devloping world.

Open Access Challanges

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Today I wrote a guest post, “Open Access from the Perspective of an Academic Journal,” for Dr. Jonathan Eisen‘s blog The Tree of Life.

Dr. Eisen is an evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of California Genome Center. He first wrote about JoVE on his blog in 2008 when we were still an open access resource and was saddened when we went to a subscription model. But, he was more than willing to hear our side of the story:

Open Access from the Perspective of an Academic Journal

I work for the first and only peer-reviewed science video journal indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). We started as an open access resource in 2006, but that model wasn’t sustainable for us. The cost of producing high-quality video was simply too high.

So how do we remain profitable without losing our open access roots? Balance.

We started offering subscriptions in 2009, but still try to open up access wherever we can. We recently partnered with Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), to give free subscriptions to developing countries in South America, Asia and Africa.

HINARI, a World Health Organization (WHO) initiative, grants developing countries access to one of the largest collections of biomedical and health literature. It was founded in 2002 after a WHO survey found that 56 percent of institutions in the poorest countries had no current subscriptions to academic journals.

“Researchers from developing countries were saying ‘we need access to subscription literature, we can’t afford it, and without it, we can’t be part of the global research community,” said HINARI Library Program Manager Kimberly Parker.

To keep reading, please click here.

Good News For Scientists in Developing Countries

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Dr. Lucia Prieto Godino is a post doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who is using JoVE to teach a Drosophila Neurogenetics course at Kampala International University in Uganda.

She will have free access to our journal while she teaches her course, and her students will have access once they return to their home institutions through our partnership with HINARI.

Dr. Godino uses her blog to communicate with her students before the class and recently posted an announcement about JoVE:

Good News For Scientists in Developing Countries

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE) will be offering free subscriptions through the HINARI initiative to developing countries in South America, Asia and Africa.

Drosophila (c) Alex Wild 2005

In 2000 a WHO survey found that 56 percent of institutions in the poorest countries had no current subscriptions to academic journals. In response, WHO founded HINARI, which now grants developing countries access to one of the largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Now JOVE is joining this amazing initiative.

JOVE publishes video articles demonstrating advanced experiments performed in laboratories of top research universities. Visualizing the experiments rather than trying to reproduce them from the often brief materials & methods section of papers is the best way to be able to reproduce previous experiments and set-up new techniques in a lab. This becomes particularly important in developing countries, where learning cutting-edge experimental techniques, whether via courses or by visiting laboratories with the desired expertise, is often very difficult.

We will celebrate this great news by using several JOVE articles as part of the teaching materials in the course.

To read an interview with Dr. Godino about her upcoming course, please click here.