Scientific and medical publisher Wiley-Blackwell announced this week (February 20) that they will work with the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first online video methods journal, to add methods videos to the journal Current Protocols.

Rumors of JoVE's deal with Wiley-Blackwell and other mainstream science publishers have been circulating in the blogosphere since late January. Moshe Pritsker, CEO of JoVE, told The Scientist this week that he had also signed similar deals with Annual Reviews and Springer Protocols.

JoVE has about 200 methods videos on its Web site; the Wiley-Blackwell deal plans for another 200 in the coming year. According to Pritsker, the company has a network of video teams on the ready in cities in the US, Canada and Japan who can film and edit the video. Because the videos require intensive editing (10 or 15 minutes of video from, say, a three to four hour experiment) and technical expertise, they're expensive to produce, he said, though he refused to give an estimate of the cost. (Last summer, for a news story in The Scientist on video imaging, Pritsker estimated the cost of making a video at a few hundred dollars, but that's no longer the case: "As the professional level of our videos increased, our production expenses increased too," he wrote in an Email to me yesterday.)

"Our idea is to become the video platform of the biological sciences," Pritsker said.