SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics (Bellingham, WA and Cardiff, Wales), has announced that two of its journals, the Journal of Biomedical Optics and Neurophotonics, will become fully open access journals starting in January 2019.
The Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) has been published since 1996 and is edited by Lihong Wang of California Institute of Technology. Brian Pogue of Dartmouth College will assume the JBO editorship starting in January 2018. JBO publishes peer-reviewed papers on the use of modern optical technology for improved health care and biomedical research.
Neurophotonics, edited by David Boas of Boston University, was launched by SPIE in 2014. A companion journal to JBO, Neurophotonics covers advances in optical technology applicable to study of the brain and their impact on the basic and clinical neuroscience applications.
Both journals are published online in the SPIE Digital Library (www.spiedigitallibrary.org) as well as in print.
"SPIE is converting JBO and Neurophotonics to open access with strong endorsement from the editorial boards and those most closely involved with the two journals," says incoming SPIE Publications Committee chair David Andrews of the University of East Anglia.
All papers will be published as gold open access under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. Review papers and tutorials will continue to have open access subsidized by SPIE.
Beginning with submissions received as of 1 July 2018, all authors will be required to pay a small article processing charge (APC) if their paper is accepted for publication. The complete archives of both journals will become fully open access as of January 2019. All articles will continue to be copyedited, typeset, peer reviewed, and published in a timely manner, says SPIE. The median time from submission to first decision in both journals is less than 6 weeks, and the median time from acceptance to publication is approximately 3 weeks.
Discounted APC fees will be extended to SPIE members and to authors affiliated with institutions that subscribe to the SPIE Digital Library. Partial fee waivers will be made available to authors from certain low-income developing countries.
Both journals currently operate on a subscription model with an author-choice open access option. Once the transition from the current hybrid model to full open access is complete on 1 January 2019, the journals will no longer charge subscription fees for access.