A science journal that broke the mold of academic publishing with a YouTube-inspired approach to sharing new studies is celebrating its fifth year with a growing Web audience.

The Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE, is an online, peer-reviewed and indexed scientific journal that highlights the latest research on everything from plankton cells to human diseases.

What makes JoVE different from some 25,000 scientific journals published worldwide is that it presents information in video format. Subscribers can watch scientists perform and discuss experiments, show off new lab techniques and browse through microscope slides.

JoVE co-founder and editor-in-chief Moshe Pritsker told CTV News he wanted to introduce a new method of publishing science, what he called "a visualization of what actually goes on in a scientific laboratory."

As a result, potentially groundbreaking studies that might seem dry in a jargon-filled academic paper are now accessible to a wider audience in a "show-and-tell" format.

"It's an amazing way to present research," said Oksana Kaidanovich-Beilin, a researcher at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, which has so far submitted 20 studies to JoVE.

"It's open access, so anyone can watch what we are doing."

When JoVE first went live five years ago, hardly anyone knew about it. Many researchers thought it odd to submit videos of their experiments instead of writing papers about the results.

The JoVE site now gets about 10,000 hits a day and its profile is growing.

"It's one thing to read and it's another thing to watch something be done," said Jim Woodgett, a professor at Mount Sinai's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute.

"It's a little bit like reading a cookbook, versus watching a chef on TV actually demonstrate what they're doing."

Those who use JoVE say the innovative site fosters faster exchange of information and better learning. JoVE is now publishing six different online journals and generating $5 million a year in subscriptions.

With a report from CTV's medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip