The Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) has a new benefit for authors who support the journal through payment of voluntary page charges. Starting in January 2013, research articles for which such page charges are paid will gain open access immediately at publication. All review and tutorial articles will continue to enjoy unconditional open access. Open access will enable anyone to read your article online at no charge and should lead to more awareness of your research and may result in more citations. In addition, authors will retain copyright for open access articles through a Creative Commons attribution license (CC-BY “gold open access”; see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). This is the type of license that many employers and research-funding agencies prefer or require.

The voluntary page charge is $100 per published two-column page. Therefore, payment of $300 for a three-page letter article or $700 to $900 for an average-length full research article will suffice for immediate open access. Articles contributed by authors who lack the funds to support JBO in this way will continue to be freely available to the journal’s many individual and institutional subscribers. These articles will be covered by SPIE’s generous copyright transfer policy.

SPIE will continue to deposit NIH-funded articles with PubMed Central on the authors’ behalf for JBO. These articles become openly accessible at PubMed Central immediately if the voluntary page charges are paid or after a one-year embargo period if page charges cannot be paid.

After rapid peer review, all accepted JBO articles are professionally copyedited and typeset (which reduces your work in preparing your article and improves its quality), and are promptly published online in the SPIE Digital Library.