SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced that two of its journals, the Journal of Biomedical Optics and Neurophotonics, will become fully open access journals starting in January 2019. "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," said incoming SPIE publications committee chair, David Andrews, of the University of East Anglia. "This new and exciting development for SPIE journals will support broad global access to timely and valuable published research." JBO has been published since 1996 and is edited by Lihong Wang of the 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. "We believe open access will allow JBO to reach a broader readership in a timely fashion and better serve the biomedical optics community and users of our technologies,” Wang said. "I am excited about the transition to open access for JBO and look forward to helping shepherd this change through,” Pogue said. 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 as well as in print. "I am pleased that SPIE is converting Neurophotonics to a fully open access journal," Boas said. "This will greatly facilitate broader dissemination of the research being published in the journal and simply recognizes that the majority of Neurophotonics authors have already opted to make their papers open access." All papers will be published as gold open access under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. The complete archives of both journals will become fully open access. All articles will continue to be copy edited, typeset and peer reviewed and published in a timely manner. The median time from submission to first decision in both journals is less than six weeks, and the median time from acceptance to publication is approximately three weeks.