The first issue of Investigative Ophthalmology was published in January 1962, with Bernard Becker, MD, as the Executive Editor.

[2] Abstracts from the ARVO Annual Meeting have been published as an issue of IOVS since 1977.

[2] Also in 1977, IOVS was accepted for inclusion in Index Medicus (and later in MEDLINE) and PubMed.

[2] In January 2016, IOVS ended its subscription program and became open access.

[3] All content is freely available to read, and content published 2016-onward is freely available for reuse under either the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license or Creative Commons Attribution license.