The OSA Publishing program furthers The Optical Society's (OSA) mission to promote the generation, application and archiving of knowledge in optics and photonics and to disseminate this knowledge worldwide. OSA journals publish quality, trusted scientific content, and OSA supports sustainable models of access that enable long-term provision of and access to that content for the widest audience possible.

Open Access Journals

OSA was a leader in open access, launching its first gold open-access journal, Optics Express, in 1997. More than twenty years on, the program now offers a range of gold and green open access options as well as multiple copyright and licensing options.

Optics Express, Optical Materials Express, Biomedical Optics Express, and Optica are all open access journals, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Beginning in September 2017, users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. Authors may also opt to make their articles freely available in our hybrid journals, Journal of the Optical Society A, Journal of the Optical Society B, Applied Optics, and Optics Letters.

Licensing

OSA offers two open access licensing options for our authors; an open access publishing agreement, and, where required, CC BY licensing.
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Fees and refund policy

OSA's open access journals are freely and widely available to all readers via OSA Publishing's Digital Library. In lieu of paid subscriptions, authors or their institutions pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) after their paper has been accepted for publication.
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Posting and reuse policies

OSA's policies afford authors, their employers, and third parties the right to reuse the author's Accepted Manuscript (AM) or the final published Version of Record (VoR) of the article as outlined.
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Article Deposit Policies

OSA assists authors in complying with several funder deposit requirements.
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