SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced a new programme that provides Gold Open Access upon publication for a journal article for which authors or their institutions pay voluntary page charges, beginning in January 2013. Authors will retain copyright under the Creative Commons CC-BY license.
The new programme covers articles in the SPIE journals - Optical Engineering; Journal of Biomedical Optics; Journal of Electronic Imaging, co-published with IS&T; Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS; Journal of Applied Remote Sensing; Journal of Nanophotonics; and Journal of Photonics for Energy. SPIE will continue open access publication at no cost to authors for all review and tutorial articles. Also, it will continue to deposit NIH-funded articles with PubMed Central on the authors' behalf.
With more than 375,000 journal articles and conference proceedings papers and 167 SPIE Press books, the SPIE Digital Library claims to be the world's largest collection of optics and photonics literature.
To support researchers in developing or low-income countries, SPIE participates in the eJDS programme of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, providing papers on demand to individual scientists, and the Information Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications PERii programme, providing access to libraries in developing nations at low or reduced rates.
Earlier this year, SPIE announced a freeze on subscription prices for 2013 - the fourth freeze or price decrease in as many years - in response to financial pressures faced by subscribing libraries.
