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nabling Open Access (OA) to scientific research is imperative to ECS in our mission to disseminate the best research in our technical fields as widely as possible. Open Access means that an article is freely available online to anyone who wishes to see it, so the reader neither has to pay for it directly, nor belong to an institution that subscribes to the journal it appears in. Instead, the costs of publication are paid upfront before publication (usually by funding institutions, employers, or authors, rather than afterwards by readers or their institutions). Open Access is a move toward disseminating the results of important scientific work more widely through removing subscription barriers, and thereby making the outputs of research accessible to anyone with an Internet connection who may need or want to see them. (For those who would like a more comprehensive introduction to OA, Peter Suber’s article is a great place to start.) Up until the end of 2013, the majority of ECS’s journal publication activities were funded through subscriptions. Moving toward OA requires a change to the way we finance these activities. The challenge for us as a nonprofit society publisher is how to put the best OA business model in place for the future, which allows us to sustain excellence throughout our journals, while enabling Open Access. Our long-term goal is to move away from the subscriptions model entirely. We need to fundamentally change the way we finance our work, and while we relish the challenge, we are choosing to tread cautiously to make sure we get it right and can provide a sustainable solution for the future. As a first step, ECS is embarking on its OA journey with a mixed funding model for enabling Open Access, currently including Article Processing Charges and subscriptions. Author Choice Open Access is now an option within our current subscriptions-based business model. Authors who wish to make their published article immediately Open Access will need to either pay an Article Processing Charge or use an Article Credit in place of payment. All four of our peer-reviewed journals will offer Author Choice Open Access. If an author does not wish to make their article Open Access then there is no change to the way the article is accessed by others, and no Article Processing Charge will be applied. Our journals, quality standards, review and editorial processes will otherwise continue exactly as they are now.