JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) is a new approach to peer reviewed journals : specifically devoted to the biological sciences (life sciences), JoVE is indexed by PubMed. The goal of JoVE aid the transmission of information - particularly that which is not sufficiently represented by static text and images. JoVE claims that their approach - using video publishing - "promotes efficiency and performance" by eliminating time wasted on learning and perfecting new techniques based on traditionally published works.

The Editorial Board for JoVE boasts members of the scientific community from the best institutions in the world... Harvard, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Princeton,
University of Zurich -the list illustrates an impressive number of highly qualified board members. The project was begun at Harvard in 2006 by a post-doc, Moishe Pritsker, now CEO and editor-in-chief of JoVE.

Access:
Initially, JoVE was conceived of as an open-access project, however, that model proved itself impossible, given the high costs of producing the videos. According to Pritsker,

"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." (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/06/jove/)

Thus, a pricing structure was created to cover these costs: "$1,000 for small colleges to $2,400 for PhD-granting institutions, prices which are in league with other commercial scientific journals. In addition, authors are charged $1,500 per article for video production services ($500 without), and there are open access options: $3,000/article with production services ($2,000 without)." (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/06/jove/)

Taking a look JoVE's Press section, I was surprised to find they had posted articles criticizing their decision to go closed-access. While these criticisms are valid, so are JoVE's explanations of why open-access wasn't a possibility. Given the newness of this "product" and the fact that there is no existing model, it makes sense that charging for access is the only way to offset the price of video production without all of the costs falling on the research institute.

How it looks:
Videos are very high quality and accompanied by a complete scholarly article that acts as a transcript of sorts to the video.

Overall, I'm very impressed by JoVE, and while for now it is closed access it seems that as more stakeholders buy in and the model becomes more widely accepted it may be possible in the future.