All JoVE publications include a text manuscript and a video. The manuscript will serve as the foundation for the content in the video. Every author is responsible for writing and addressing revisions in their manuscript according to internal and peer review comments. The video portion of the article can be produced by either JoVE’s professional team or the author. JoVE films, edits and produces most videos because of our experience as both a publishing and video production house. We have the services and workflow established to make publication a straightforward and easy experience. If you are within our videographer network, you can choose the Video Produced by JoVE option.
Authors outside of our videographer network who have the professional and technical skills of editing video and audio may submit their own videos. However, if an author chooses to create their own video, it must meet the same publication standards of a Video Produced by JoVE. These videos must adhere to the JoVE format and style, as well as meet the technical guidelines specified in our Guidelines for Video Produced by Author. Both the manuscript and video must be simultaneously submitted and will go through the editorial and external peer review process together. Please note that Video Produced by Author submissions receive no production assistance from the JoVE video production staff, thus we only recommend this option if the authors have access to technical video production facilities. Both the text and video components frequently require multiple revisions prior to publication, so authors must have continued access to video editing equipment. Further details of the author produced video submission policies can be found on our Video Produced by Author workflow page.
Your main responsibilities as a JoVE author are twofold. You are responsible for (1) writing and submitting a manuscript, followed by addressing any necessary revisions during the internal and/or peer review process and (2) preparing your laboratory for filming and demonstrating the protocol on the day of filming. Your interactions with JoVE as an author are given below.
Step 1: Submission and Review
Step 2: Filming
Step 3: Video Editing
Step 4: Publishing
This publication from George Church’s group at Harvard University is an open-access video that can be used to preview our video content.
To create a JoVE account, please follow the first link below. If you are an author, use the email address that was associated with your submission, allowing you to download your article (PDF and video). The second link allows you to reset your password.
“Standard” access refers to any content published in JoVE that requires an institutional subscription to view. Some authors choose to pay an additional fee to provide access to the public, known as publishing in “open” access.
As a JoVE author, you are able to use your article for non-commercial purposes, which include the reprint. Since JoVE’s content is web-based, there are no traditional hard copies. However, as the author, you are able to download your publication (both the written and video component) and share with colleagues. You could then send these files to a colleague via a CD, flash drive or ftp/file-sharing site. Also, JoVE permits authors to embed their videos on their academic websites. To do this, please contact your editor or support@jove.com.
NIH-supported authors can self-deposit their full text accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. Relevant links: NIH Public Access Policy, FAQs and Manuscript Submission System.
If you have any questions, please contact us at editorial-office@jove.com.
JoVE Journal’s 2022 ISI Impact Factor is 1.2.
JoVE Journal is indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, SciFinder, Scopus, and SCI Expanded as Journal of Visualized Experiments (J. Vis. Exp.)
Please cite your article and encourage others to do the same whenever you use the techniques documented in it. Our citation format is: Author. Title. Journal(Issue), Page, doi:DOI (Year).
Ex: Welstead, G. G., Brambrink, T., Jaenisch, R. Generating iPS Cells from MEFS through Forced Expression of Sox-2, Oct-4, c-Myc, and Klf4. J. Vis. Exp. (14), e734, doi:10.3791/734 (2008).
As soon as your article is published on JoVE’s website, you may download the PDF text and the .MOV video file. To download your article files, simply log into the JoVE website using your author-associated email address, i.e. the one you used for publishing, and click the links on the right side of your article page. If you have not yet created a JoVE account, please register with JoVE using your author-associated email address. If you already have a JoVE account, you can reset your JoVE password as necessary.
We encourage all of our authors to use their video for educational and teaching purposes, including embedding your video into your laboratory homepage.
A preprint is the author’s version of a manuscript prior to peer review. Authors may post preprints to a non-commercial preprint server. When posting the preprint, authors should choose a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Upon publication, authors are responsible for ensuring that any existing preprints are updated to include a reference to the published article. The reference should include the DOI of the published article and a link to the article on the JoVE website.
If most of your funding comes from an institution located in a low- or middle-income country on this list, or if the corresponding author of your article is an early-career researcher, you may be eligible for our new publication fee assistance program. Please contact (submissions@jove.com) prior to submission; a JoVE Editor will follow up with you shortly.
If you have spoken with a JoVE editor, please check your email for an invitation to submit a manuscript and click the included link to our submission site. If you have not spoken with an editor, first, visit our Publish page, then after reviewing our Manuscript Instructions for Authors, visit our submission site.
If you indicated a corresponding author that is not yourself, their approval is required before the submission process is completed. To move forward, either log into the submission site with their credentials (with their permission) or have the official “corresponding author” check their email, where they will find a link to view and approve the submission, officially submitting the manuscript to JoVE. The corresponding author for submissions will receive all correspondence prior to publication and does not necessarily need to be the one listed as the corresponding author on the publication. If you are having difficulty, please contact your editor to change the corresponding author on your submission.
JoVE assumes that the corresponding author represents all authors during the publication process, but the published corresponding author may differ from that used for correspondence with the editorial office during the submission and publication process. Please consider selecting a long-term corresponding author for publication.
Please read the red text. More than likely, you have required information missing from one of the submission steps. Perhaps you didn’t fill in a postal code for a co-author or maybe you only suggested 2 reviewers. You won’t be able to submit until you have input all required information in all steps. The red text should indicate exactly which step is incomplete. If you still experience problems, let us know.
Please ensure that the Excel template (available here) has ‘Word Wrapping’ enabled and is in Landscape view. This will allow your entire table to fit on one page and not bump columns to new pages.
If a file is larger than 50MB, you will not be able to upload this file through the JoVE submission site. Instead, you should continue with your submission and contact your editor or editorial-office@jove.com for instructions on uploading your large files to our FTP site. Typically, this will be true of authors choosing our video produced by author publication option. You should submit a low resolution copy of the video (less than 50MB) via the submission site and after your submission is received and assigned to an editor, please notify the editor that you need to upload large files. Instructions for uploading large files/high resolution video will be sent to you.
For a comprehensive overview of our style guide, you can download it here.
The script is the document that defines the spoken content of your video. It is based on your initial submission. JoVE scriptwriters take your submission and convert it into a voiceover for the video; it is essentially a transcript, which will be read by voice talent at JoVE. You will not need to memorize it for filming.
As the script is geared toward guiding the video production, it may not contain all of the content that you originally submitted in your manuscript. Preparation steps, reagent recipes, or routine methods, may be omitted from the script document because they are not novel and are tedious to film. Your original submission will make up the text portion of your video-article, which will be displayed on the same page as your video. A downloadable PDF will also be available with your video-article.
Many JoVE personnel involved in the production of your article will work from the script document. These include the videographer, editor, voice talent, scientific editors, and you. Our script format is geared to the tasks of each of these individuals, so it is important that you are mindful of the numbering scheme and structure of this document while you make your edits.
Our videographer will bring a camera and microscope adapter setup to film your microscope work. Our adapter kit is more or less universally adaptable to all microscopes, because it fits in the ocular or trinocular ports, which, according to industry standards, are usually 30 or 23 mm in internal diameter.
One complication with our scope and adapter system is that complicated dissections may need to be performed as you look through one eyepiece. If your scope does not have a trinocular port housing with the internal diameter mentioned above, or does not project a virtual image, in stereo, to both the eyepieces and third port, then you will be unable to use both sets of eyepieces. The best solution is to try to find access to a teaching scope or stereoscope with a discussion bridge, since these have two sets of eyepieces and make it very easy for us to capture your footage.
Many of our authors who don’t have access to a teaching scope are fine with performing microscope work using one eye. These individuals will generally practice their procedures this way in the days before the experiment.
The length of filming depends on the length of your protocol. Because of our length limitations on the protocol portion of the script, JoVE filming averages 6 to 7 hours. This includes videographer preparation and pack up time, filming of the protocol, the introduction and conclusion sections.
A simple way to estimate the duration of the shoot is to look at the number of steps in your protocol and the length of each step. In general, we require one visual per 1.5 lines of 12 pt text, and each visual takes about 5 minutes to capture. If your protocol consists of 30 steps comprised of three lines of text, then it will take about 5 hours to shoot your video protocol.
No, protocols are filmed in one day. When additional shoot days are requested, authors are required to pay additional fees. To accommodate the single shoot day, long experiments with overnight incubation times will require samples to be prepared and processed before we arrive. On the day of filming, the protocol should be set up like a cooking show, meaning all parts of the recipe are ready to go and you can quickly move from one step to the next. If an additional shoot day is absolutely required, authors can take advantage of our Author-Provided Footage model to avoid the additional fees.
No, footage of the computer screen can often look distorted on camera, even if we dial down the shutter speed. Our suggestion is for you to download and use screen capture software to demonstrate computer based procedures and analyses. Popular screen capture programs for PC include Screen Capture Professional, Camtasia, or Adobe Captivate. For Mac, iShowU and iShowU HD are preferred. An excellent piece of software for both operating systems is SnagIt.
Please provide any screen capture files to us using either .mov (h.264 codec, 2 MB/s bitrate) or .avi formats (cinepak codec, 2 MB/s bitrate) and name files according to the step at which screen actions appear in the script.
All requests for multiple filming locations require approval from our production staff prior to submission; please e-mail your editor or submissions@jove.com with related requests. Generally, if the second location is within 1 hr drive of the primary laboratory location, then JoVE can film at both locations. However, minor changes may be required of your protocol section, in order to facilitate filming. If the second filming location is greater than 1 hr driving distance from the primary location, then another day of filming will be required and will incur an additional filming fee.
On average, your article will be published roughly 3 months from your filming date. However, there are factors that influence this time line that depend on you. Some of your video will likely contain additional media (image, movie, graphic files) that you need to provide to us that were not included in your initial manuscript submission.
Delays in submitting this material will cause a delay in your article being released. You will also be required to provide us with comments on your video article after a rough cut is produced. Submitting comments late will delay publication. However, we will not publish the video until you approve your article.
JoVE depends, in part, on the payment of publication fees to support its operations. Articles are considered for publication solely on the basis of their scientific merit and peer review.
For manuscripts submitted after January 1st, 2025, the publication fee is $2400. If authors choose the open access option for their full-text article, an additional fee of $1,800 will apply.
No additional fees apply if an author submits a video with their text manuscript. If the open access option is selected, the full-text article and author-submitted video will be freely available on the JoVE website, without a subscription.
No additional fees apply if an author engages JoVE production services to produce a video. The videos produced by the JoVE production services are not a part of the author’s submission and are available on the JoVE website under subscription.
Reviewers remain anonymous throughout the entire publication process. We will not release reviewer names to authors or other reviewers. JoVE will not allow any attempt by authors to determine the identity of reviewers and we encourage reviewers to neither confirm nor deny any speculations regarding their identity.
Reviewers should not contact authors. Instead, please contact our Editorial Office with any questions or concerns. We utilize a single-blind review process; reviewers can access author identities to further inform their review and prevent any conflicts of interest. However, the editor will compile all peer review comments with any editorial comments and send these to the authors on the reviewers’ behalf.
We ask that peer reviewers declare any financial or personal conflict of interest before accepting an invitation to review. For more details regarding conflicts of interest, please see our Editorial Policies.
Referees and editors must exclude themselves from handling a submission if a conflict of interest affects their ability to make an impartial scientific judgment.
The final decision on potential conflicts of interest rests with JoVE. If there are any concerns regarding a specific conflict of interest, please contact review@jove.com.
The yellow highlighting indicates the essential parts of the protocol to be filmed. The un-highlighted protocol text provides additional details that are not explicitly shown in the video. The manuscript in its entirety will be published alongside the video.
JoVE publishes two types of works: JoVE Produced Videos and Videos Produced by Authors.
For JoVE Produced Videos: Peer reviewers are asked to review the manuscript text, and not the video. Filming occurs after peer review, based on the finalized manuscript. Please review the manuscript in its entirety, with an emphasis on methodological rigor to ensure accuracy of the final video article.
For Videos Produced by Authors: The authors produce a video prior to peer review, and the peer reviewers are asked to review the video alongside the manuscript. If asked to review a manuscript with an author submitted video, a link to the video will be provided in the initial invitation email along with the manuscript text.
JoVE videos are a unique and effective tool to learn and share a particular technique. We are primarily concerned about publishing highly reproducible methodologies regardless of novelty. These methodologies can be previously published protocols or new techniques. Previously published protocols must be properly cited. Please note that results for experiments can be representative.
If there are any further questions that are not answered above please feel free to email peerreview@jove.com.
