Ever since the internet became widely accessible in the 1990s, there has been increasing interest in making the world's scholarly journals available to all without subscriptions. While publishers initially opposed this, it became clear that the concept of unrestricted access to journals was gaining momentum. Many new journals were started under the open access model, and this has put pressure on traditional publications to do the same. IOVS was already participating in free access by providing a 6-month embargo date, and the other ARVO journals, Journal of Vision and Translational Vision Science & Technology, were always free access with copyright held by ARVO.
Now, it is with great pleasure that I announce that
IOVS will go open access starting January 1, 2016. There will be, as is the case with other open access journals, flat per-article pricing that will be applied to all articles submitted on or after December 1, 2015. We will offer an ARVO membership discount of $350 to all corresponding authors. Like other journals that have gone open access, authors will be able to select under which type of license they wish their manuscript to be published (see
http://arvojournals.org/SS/openaccess.aspx for license explanations). All content published prior to January 1, 2016 will still be copyrighted to ARVO but will become free access. Most articles will have a CC BY-NC-ND license (see
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Feel free to read more about the open access change at
http://arvojournals.org/SS/openaccess.aspx.
The movement to open access will increase the readership of IOVS and will probably increase the journal's impact factor, as more investigators can gain access to articles in a timely manner. We look forward to having IOVS as an open access journal and to better serving our readership and the vision research community.