More open access to AJP articles

"If you are a meticulous reader of the online version of AJP, you might have noticed some subtle changes during the past few months. The online version is accessed through the Scitation web site,1 where each article is marked using a small icon with the abbreviation F, OA, S, or T. These symbols are defined in the right-hand column and designate the content as either Free, Open Access, Subscribed, or free Trial. Until the end of last year, all content in AJP was labeled S, meaning that non-subscribers could access it only by paying a $30-per-article fee. Most colleges and universities are subscribers to AJP—or at least they should be2—and these subscriptions are typically verified via IP addresses so that access is automatically available on any computer at the institution. Alternatively, nearly all members of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) receive personal online subscriptions to AJP as part of their membership and can therefore log in to view AJP articles. However, in January of this year AJP published its very first open-access article. This article, which discusses an alternative approach to Kirchoff's laws for circuits,3 is published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license4 and is freely available via Scitation to anyone on the internet. We are now offering this open-access option to all authors of full-length papers at a per-article cost to the authors (or to their institutions or funding agencies) of $2200, which offsets a portion of our expenses. More recently, two additional sets of authors have taken advantage of this new option, providing open access to last month's cover article on the physics behind the wormhole visualization in the movie Interstellar,5 and a forthcoming article on biomedical imaging and optical microscopy.6 ..."