The future of scientific journals?

[Steve.J]

While searching for relevant peer-reviewed scientific papers with interesting LabVIEW content (and there's lots of it out there) I stumbled across a relatively new website called the Journal of Visualized Experiments or JOVE. Billed as the "video journal for biological and medical research", it is sort of a YouTube for scientific researchers, but with true editorial standards and staff.  The quality of the video productions are excellent - clear, well scripted and well edited.  The website requires you to create an account (free for limited access to the content but all of the video abstracts).  I was thrilled to see that of the approximately 1000 video articles published so far, there are nearly 40 articles where LabVIEW was used to help researchers control the experimental procedure, perform datalogging, signal processing, or some other combination of tasks.

A quick sampling of some of the video articles that include LabVIEW applications:

• Digital Microfluidics for Automated Proteomic Processing
• Single-unit In vivo Recording from the Optic Chiasm of Rat
• Measuring the Bending Stiffness of Bacterial Cells Using an Optical Trap

As the methods employed to advance scientific understanding of biological processes get increasingly more complex, these video articles provide a great way to clearly convey the setup and procedures in a way that no paper or on-line article could ever duplicate. Since experimental validation depends on the ability of others to duplicate results, and the progress of advancement relies on building on the research of other investigators, this new way of communicating methods looks to be filling a key gap.  Look to see more sites like this popping up in other areas of scientific discovery.