SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced that an author-choice open access publishing program for journals, launched earlier this year, is gaining strong participation from authors and increasing the volume of freely accessible, peer-reviewed optics and photonics research literature as a result.
According to Eric Pepper, SPIE Director of Publications, more than six times as many authors are choosing open-access publication in SPIE journals since the launch of the 'gold' open access program at the beginning of this year. In less than 10 months, the number has risen from 5 percent to more than 30 percent of all new articles published in SPIE journals.
The SPIE program allows authors to have their journal articles open access immediately on publication in the SPIE Digital Library, with payment of modest voluntary page charges, Pepper explained. In addition, authors choosing this program retain copyright through a Creative Commons CC-BY license.
Authors selecting the open-access program pay $100 per published journal page for two-column journals or $60 per published page for single-column journals, Pepper said. These payments by authors and their employers or other funders of their research enable SPIE to hold down subscription prices and maximize access to the research.
Authors affected by public access mandates in the United Kingdom by the Research Councils UK as well as in the United States by the National Institutes of Health and now more broadly applied by the Office of Science and Technology Policy are among those who benefit from the new program.
In addition to the new program, review articles and tutorials published in SPIE journals are made open access by SPIE without cost to either authors or readers. For its Journal of Biomedical Optics, SPIE deposits articles funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health with PubMed Central on the authors' behalf.
Authors may continue to publish their articles in SPIE journals if they opt not to pay page charges. If accepted, these articles are published with access control and the standard SPIE copyright. However, all SPIE authors may deposit their articles in institutional repositories to meet "green" open access requirements.
