In the changing landscape of modern publishing, our goal for JOSA A is to remain the archive for foundational articles in optics and to be the place the community comes to learn. Not all papers that are valuable in meeting this goal also meet the usual standards of novelty required for acceptance in JOSA A, but they are excellent in other ways. Recognizing this, we have introduced new article types in recent years. The discussion paper [1] is meant to provide a format for interesting observations, questions, and any other sort of constructive commentary judged to be stimulating and useful. Mini-reviews afford us an opportunity to invite authors of our most influential papers to come back with a review of the field and the directions their work has taken since first publication.

We would like to introduce our readers to another article type new to JOSA A. In August of this year, we published our first two tutorial papers [2,3], and another was published in November [4].

Tutorial articles are intended to provide instructive materials not available in textbooks or in a single-journal source. They are not intended to be comprehensive reviews or to report novel research. Additionally, they are by invitation only, and for the first year, tutorials will be freely available to all readers whether they have a subscription or not. We hope that graduate students and researchers entering the field will find them useful in their work and that established researchers will find in them new perspective and valuable tools.

We hope to publish a new tutorial every month or two. We are grateful to our authors who have given their time and energy to produce beautifully written manuscripts and to those who have committed to do so in the coming months. As always, we welcome feedback and hope that this new initiative will be valuable to JOSA A readers.