Video to improve Reproducibility - by jove, did you know that ?

We often say a picture is worth a thousand words. Then a Video must be worth a ten thousand words. If this is true, then what took us this long to figure out that scientific journals should publsih videos instead of text. 

Here it is - an online journal that publishes videos of experiments.

 

The Idea: Journal of Visualized Experiments—JoVE 

an online journal where video is the main medium rather than a supplement. Each JoVE article consists of a short video segment that visually documents the required steps for performing an experiment. The video is supplemented by several paragraphs of peer-reviewed text. JoVE has developed a following in the life sciences, where being able to reproduce the results of an experiment in a timely fashion is a critical component to becoming a successful researcher.

 

http://www.jove.com/ - 1765 video articles published, 50 articles per month ! - spans across Neuroscience, Bioengineering, Applied Physics, Immunology, Medicene etc - amazing collection

Origin of the Idea:

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/40444/

 

The idea for JoVE originated when Pritsker was a Princeton graduate student in molecular biology and needed to replicate a procedure to culture embryonic stem cells. He tried following the text-based description in a peer-reviewed paper, but was unsuccessful despite repeated attempts. "It's a big source of frustration and waste of money and time, because instead of doing your science, you spend your time trying to reproduce something which was done already."

The alternatives at the time were scant: get someone else to show you, or keep trying on your own and hope for a breakthrough. In Pritsker's case, his lab at Princeton paid for him to take a two-week trip to the lab where the original work was performed, in Edinburgh, Scotland—an option many labs don't have, he says. "How many laboratories in the world went through the same trouble, but they could not travel, they did not have this opportunity to go there?"

The point of publishing an experimental procedure in a peer-reviewed journal, says Pritsker, is so that other scientists can re-create it for their own purposes. But the conventional way of transferring what Pritsker calls the "how-to" components of experiments is so inefficient that the experiments are often irreproducible.

http://blog.jove.com/author/moshe-pritsker/ - Improving reproducibility of scientific article - Visual demonstration is a better way to teach a new technique than just reading the text alone. Scientists mostly learn

 

Now Think about this: 

Where else does it make sense to replace text by video - sports columns of magazines & newspapers, medical instructions, cooking recipe, equipment operation manual, child care books, all experimental science books.

 

Also think if it makes sense to replace video by text in certain situations !

 

If Braille can make text accessible to visually impaired people, what technology can make videos accessible to them  ?