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SPIE Digital Library's Accessibility Statement affirms our commitment to providing an accessible web presence to all people, regardless of disabilities.

SPIE strives to provide an accessible web presence to all people. To support this commitment, SPIE follows the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA as the enterprise Web Accessibility objective.

Read our Accessibility Statement.

Download the SPIE Digital Library's Section 508 Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for detailed information about the platform's conformance to accessibility standards set by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Download the SPIE Digital Library's WCAG 2.2 Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for detailed information about the platform's conformance to accessibility standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Recent accessibility improvements:

• Comprehensive accessibility audit completed across all major page types using automated tooling (axe-core) and manual testing
• Improved keyboard navigation and visible focus indicators across the site
• Enhanced screen reader support through ARIA roles, labels, and landmarks
• Corrected heading hierarchy for clearer document structure on each page
• Improved color contrast and readability across UI elements
• Mobile and responsive accessibility improvements
• Descriptive alt text added to the majority of web page images

Ongoing areas of work toward full WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance:

• Accessible PDFs
• Alt text for article figures and graphics
• Continued refinement of keyboard navigation patterns

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of the SPIE Digital Library. If you have any trouble accessing information on the SPIE Digital Library, or if you would be interested in volunteering for end-user testing, please contact SPIEDLSupport@spie.org.

Personal accounts allow you to use personalized features such as creating and managing email alerts, keeping track of your favorite publications by saving them to My Library, accessing individual subscriptions to journals or conference proceedings, and purchasing articles.

Additionally, if your institution subscribes to the SPIE Digital Library, your personal account allows you to log in and access your institution's subscription even when you are away from work or school (for example, from your home computer or mobile phone).

Your privacy is important to us. Our Privacy Policy explains our online information practices and the choices you can make about the information you share with us.

Anyone is eligible to create a personal account in the SPIE Digital Library. Click "Sign In" at upper right, then click "Create one" under the Personal Account sign in section.

Please note that all SPIE members and primary SPIE Conference authors already have personal accounts for the SPIE Digital Library. Your SPIE Digital Library username and password are the same as your SPIE.org username and password. If you are not sure if you already have a personal account for the SPIE Digital Library, please try to sign in using your SPIE.org credentials before creating a new account.

You may connect your SPIE account to your organization's subscription in order to access the SPIE Digital Library from any device or location. When you sign into your SPIE user account while on an IP address covered by your organization's subscription, your SPIE account will be automatically affiliated with your organization's SPIE Digital Library subscription for 90 days. After this, you can sign in again from within the organization's network to renew the connection for another 90 days.

Click "Forgot Your Password," then follow the password reset instructions.

You can sign up to receive three types of alerts: Publication Alerts for newly published journals, proceedings, and eBooks; Search Alerts for newly published content matching specific search criteria; or Errata Alerts for updates to existing articles or papers.

You can create and manage alerts by signing in to your personal account on the SPIE Digital Library and then navigating to My Account and then Email Alerts. The Email Alerts page will show you any alerts that are active in your account and allow you to unsubscribe from any unwanted alerts.

A Publication Alert will notify you of any new content published in your selected Journals, Proceedings, or eBooks.

You can create or deactivate your Publication Alerts by signing in to your personal account on the SPIE Digital Library. Once you are signed in, click My Account in the upper right, then click Email Alerts. The Publication Alerts area will allow you to select or delete alerts for specific publications.

Publication content updates are emailed at the close of each journal issue.

Search Alerts include any newly published Journal articles, Proceedings papers, and eBook chapters that match your designated search criteria. For example, if you sign up for a search alert for a specific search term or phrase such as "solar cell," then an email will be sent to let you know when new content with the keywords "solar cell" has been published.

You can create a Search Alert by first signing in to your personal account on the SPIE Digital Library. Once you are signed in, submit any search, then click "Receive Search Email Alert" in the upper right of the results area.

You can delete a Search Alert by signing in to your personal account, clicking My Account in the upper right, then clicking Email Alerts. The direct link to the Email Alerts page is: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/account/email-alerts. In the Search Alerts area of the page, you can then temporarily inactivate or delete alerts for specific searches. To temporarily deactivate a Search Alert, uncheck the box next to the search term; you can later re-activate it if desired by re-checking the box. To permanently delete the alert, click Delete.

Search Alerts are emailed twice monthly, on the first and fifteenth of each month.

Errata Alerts notify you when a content item has been updated (when an erratum is published or a paper is withdrawn, for example).

You can create an Errata Alert by first signing in to your personal account on the SPIE Digital Library. Once you are signed in, navigate to any journal article or proceedings, then click "Receive Erratum Email Alert" in the lower right area of the page.

You can unsubscribe from an Errata Alert by signing in to your personal account, clicking My Account in the upper right, then clicking Email Alerts. In the Errata Alerts area of the page, you can temporarily inactivate or delete any existing Errata Alerts. To temporarily inactivate an Errata Alert, uncheck the box next to it; you can later re-activate it if desired by re-checking the box. To permanently delete the alert, click Delete.

Errata Alerts are emailed twice monthly, on the second and sixteenth of each month.

Anyone can search and browse the site, view abstracts, tables of contents, reference lists, and author profiles, and access content labeled "Open Access."

Additionally, users with either an institutional subscription or an individual subscription (attained via SPIE membership and/or purchase of downloads) can view full text, download PDFs, watch recordings of Conference Presentations, view figures and tables, and access multimedia such as video content and supplemental data sets.

If you do not have an institutional or individual subscription, papers may be purchased individually.

If you would like to encourage your institution to subscribe to the SPIE Digital Library, we suggest submitting our Recommendation Form to your institution's library (or similar information center).

Full access to the SPIE Digital Library is available to institutional subscribers only.* Users who are not affiliated with a subscribing institution may establish individual subscriptions in two ways:

SPIE Membership
Upon joining SPIE or renewing your membership, you automatically receive ten download tokens that may be used for any journal article or proceedings paper, presentation, or poster. (Tokens cannot be used for ebooks.) You will also receive an online subscription to one of SPIE's journals of your choice. Members may also subscribe to online access to additional journals at a substantial discount.

Download Packages
Individuals may purchase a download package without a membership. Packages are available for either 50 or 25 download tokens, which are valid for one year and can be used to access any journal article or proceedings paper, presentation, or poster. (Tokens cannot be used for ebooks.)

*If you would like to encourage your institution to subscribe to the SPIE Digital Library, we suggest submitting our Recommendation Form to your institution's library (or similar information center).

Sign in to the SPIE Digital Library, click My Account, then click My Access in order to view your subscription information and a count of available tokens for downloads.

Sign in to the SPIE Digital Library, click My Account, then click My Access, then navigate to the Token Usage tab. Under Token Usage, you will see links to articles and proceedings to which you have established access via a token. This content may be accessed online for one year.

First, please note that download tokens can only be used to access journals and proceedings content. Download tokens cannot be used for eBook content.

Next, confirm that you have an active subscription and/or available download tokens by clicking My Account at upper right, then My Access, your subscription information should be under the Subscriptions tab.

• If you see a subscription and/or download tokens, check the expiration date. If the expiration date is in the future but you are unable to successfully download a PDF, please contact: spiedlsupport@spie.org
• If you do not see an active subscription and/or download tokens, but you think you should, please contact: spiedlsupport@spie.org

Conference proceedings, including papers, recorded presentations, and posters, begin to be published on the SPIE Digital Library approximately six weeks after the conference ends. Conference attendees will be notified by email when the proceedings are published. Please check back periodically to view newly published proceedings.

Conference registration includes 50 download tokens that are added to your SPIE Digital Library user account. The download tokens can be used to access proceedings (papers, recorded presentations, and posters) from the conference that you attended. When you attempt to download a PDF or view a recorded presentation on the SPIE Digital Library, you will be prompted to sign in and redeem a download token.

To view your download history and a count of available downloads, sign in to the SPIE Digital Library, click My Account, then click My Access, then navigate to the My Proceedings tab.

A note about proceedings access:

Proceedings papers and posters can either be read online or individually downloaded in PDF format and saved locally. Recorded conference presentations can be viewed within the embedded video player on the SPIE Digital Library, but they cannot be downloaded and saved locally.

The My Conference Proceedings section of your account applies only to SPIE conferences registered for prior to 2022, when conference registration included online access to a selected proceedings volume rather than download tokens. If you registered for an SPIE conference before 2022, sign in and navigate to My Account > My Access > My Conference Proceedings to see the volumes available to you.

For all conferences from 2022 onward, conference proceedings access is managed through download tokens. See the question above for details.

To purchase online access to additional proceedings volumes, please contact customerservice@spie.org.

Only registered attendees of SPIE's technical conferences, and registered exhibitors at that event, may purchase online access to an entire volume of a conference's proceedings. These individuals typically select the desired volume(s) as a part of their conference registration, or they can alternatively purchase access to the volume(s) after the conference by contacting customerservice@spie.org. 

For individuals other than registered attendees or exhibitors, we recommend establishing an individual subscription to the SPIE Digital Library, which then allows the users to access as many papers/presentations from the volume as desired. Another alternative is to purchase printed collections of proceedings, which are available on proceedings.com.

Only users from subscribing institutions can access ebooks on the SPIE Digital Library platform. Individuals who are not affiliated with subscribing institutions may instead purchase ebooks and print books on spie.org; click any book title to select among the available electronic and print formats.

My Library is a citation management tool that makes it easy to collect and organize content in the SPIE Digital Library. 

• Keep track of your favorite publications and important research
• Create and organize publications into your own personal collections/lists
• Add notes to easily reference why you saved a specific publication

Find a publication and select the “Save to My Library” button. You can then create or add the publication to a specific folder. An SPIE account is required to use this feature.

To access My Library, sign in with your SPIE account and click the arrow next to your name, located in the black bar at the upper right of the page, then select My Library.

The My Library section of your account is unrelated to your ability to access subscription content. Anyone with an SPIE account can use this tool, regardless of individual or institutional subscription status.

Yes! Both a user guide and an introductory video are available to learn more about using the SPIE Digital Library.

The "Open Access" icon   means that the author of the paper paid for it to be accessible to everyone in order to promote knowledge transfer, education, and awareness of technology and industry developments in optics and photonics. A subscription is not required to download an article marked Open Access. To find out more about Open Access publications from SPIE, please see " SPIE Open Access and Free Resources."

Front Matter for older (2001 and earlier) volumes has not been digitized and published on the SPIE Digital Library. This material may be added in the future.

SPIE's Milestone Series is not available on the SPIE Digital Library. You can view the full list of Milestones and purchase print volumes on the SPIE.org "Milestone Series" webpage.

Some Proceedings volumes are not available in the SPIE Digital Library due to conference cancellation or lack of electronic publishing rights. Please see Proceedings Volumes Not Available Online for a list of these volumes and more information. 

SPIE Journals and Proceedings follow an e-First publication model and thus use citation identifiers (CIDs) in place of traditional page numbering. A unique CID is assigned to each paper at the time of online publication, allowing us to build an online journal issue or proceedings volume one paper at a time, while retaining the ability to segment tables of contents by paper type or subject area. Utilization of CIDs allows papers to be fully citable as soon as they are published online, and connects the same identifier to all online and print versions of the publication.  

In the SPIE Digital Library, the CID is displayed both within the metadata at the top of the paper's page (just beneath the authors' names), and within the full citation at the bottom of the page. In the full-text PDF file available online and in the printed article, the CID appears on each page of the paper; appended at the end of the CID is a hyphen followed by a consecutive page number. As an example, for the journal article with CID 023407, the PDF or printed pages would carry this page numbering: 023407-1, 023407-2, 023407-3, etc. The hyphen and additional digits should not be used when citing an article.

SPIE Journals use a six-digit CID article numbering system structured as follows:

• First two digits (01-12) indicate the issue number, or in the case of single-volume annual journals, the volume number
• Middle two digits (01-99) indicate the article type and/or subject area. Current article types and subject areas (the middle two digits of the CID) vary by journal.
• Last two digits (01-99) are assigned according to publication order, within that issue and section

Proceedings of SPIE use a seven-digit CID article numbering system structured as follows:

To find the publication date of record for a Journal article or Conference Proceeding paper, navigate to that article's page and note the date above the title. The date is also included within the paper's citation, which appears at the very bottom of the page.

For Conference Proceedings, please note that the dates at the top of the volume's Table of Contents page indicate the first and last days of that conference -- not the publication date of the papers within that volume. The date within the individual paper's citation is the publication date of record, being the date that the manuscript was published on the SPIE Digital Library.

Please refer to the SPIE Article-Sharing Policies page for details on how authors may share their work.

Purchasers and users of SPIE Proceedings, Journals, and eBooks may download, save, or print purchased or freely available content to any device owned by the user solely for private use or research. Altering, posting on a public website, re-transmitting to others, systematic downloading, loading on an internal network, reselling, or republishing SPIE-copyrighted content in any form or medium without written permission from SPIE is a violation of copyright laws and is prohibited. Brief quotations or excerpts may be used in other articles, reviews, blogs, bibliographies, etc., provided they are properly cited. By electing to download, save, print, or copy any content from SPIE Publications, the User agrees to use it in a way that conforms to all applicable laws and regulations, and to these Terms of Use.

For more information, see the full SPIE Digital Library Terms of Use.