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.

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.”

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.

Nature recently published an article about scientists using videos to learn new techniques, with JoVE playing a starring role:

Learning Tools: Visual Aids

Video tutorials save not only time and effort from mentors, but also money and even travel, as Moshe Pritsker realized. As a PhD student working on stem cells at Princeton University in New Jersey, Pritsker was asked to recreate a method of culturing embryonic stem cells that had been reported by researchers in Edinburgh, UK. “I tried to follow the steps in an article,” he says. But try as he might, the experiment wouldn’t work.

Stills from JoVE videos appear in Nature

His supervisor — keen to have someone in the lab who could reliably do the technique — flew Pritsker to Edinburgh for a two-week reconnaissance and learning mission with the group that had invented it. On the return flight, Pritsker started to question the necessity of what had just happened — flying across the Atlantic Ocean to watch someone else do an experiment. “This is not the twenty-first century, this is the Stone Age,” Pritsker recalls thinking.

His solution was to “bring the ‘show me’ effect” to scientists through videos of experiments. But to sell the concept, he decided to present the clips in the form of a peer-reviewed journal. “I realized we needed an incentive for scientists to watch and make videos,” he says. The result was the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE), which Pritsker created in 2006 after finishing a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

To read the article, please click here.