Like most peer-reviewed scientific journals, subscriptions and download fees cover only a portion of the costs of publishing the Journal of Microlithography, MEMS, and MOEMS (JM³). And also like most journals, JM³ has covered some of these costs by asking its authors to voluntarily pay page charges. A large fraction of our authors accept these charges and receive just one benefit—the knowledge that they are supporting a journal that is important to their work and their scientific community. For every author who has supported us in that way over the years, I thank you. I am both grateful and encouraged to see so many in our community take a global, long-term view that a publication such as JM³ is worth supporting.

The world of publishing is changing rapidly, as is plain to see. One of the most important trends in scientific journals is open access—making a published paper available for free download by anyone as soon as it is ready. Many “open access” journals have appeared in the last decade and some are quite popular. Since these journals do not collect any revenue from readers, the cost of publishing is borne solely by the authors, who often pay a hefty fee for publication. Most of these journals are also online-only publications.

For all those in our community who support JM³: welcome to the world of open access.

JM³ 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 be open access at publication. All review and tutorial articles will continue to be open access by default. 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).

The voluntary page charge is $100 per published two-column page. Payment of $300 for a three-page letter article or $700 to $900 for an average full-length research article will result in immediate open access. Note that these voluntary page charges are only slightly higher than the current page charges, and are significantly less than the fees charged by most open access journals.

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.

For those who do not wish to pay the voluntary page charges, nothing will change. Authors who lack the funds to support JM³ in this way may continue to publish articles just as they have always been able to do. Such articles will be freely available to the journal’s many individual and institutional subscribers and available to others for a modest download fee. These articles will be covered by SPIE’s standard (and quite generous) copyright transfer policy.

All JM³ articles have strong peer review, are copyedited and typeset (which reduces your work in preparing your article and improves its quality), and are published online in the SPIE Digital Library promptly. Both a dedicated staff and a large number of volunteer editors and reviewers work together to create four high-quality issues each year. Now, the new open access option is bound to make our journal even more valuable, to the benefit of both authors and readers.