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

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.

Links

• JoVE homepage
• JoVE in the Wikipedia
• Andrew Noske's notes on JoVE from 2011