Acta updates

Open Access, no copyright Since 2005, Acta Orthopaedica has been a platinum Open Access journal. This means that all articles from 1930 until now are immediately free for everyone to read and download. Acta has no copyright on articles, which are all published under a Creative Commons Licence that permits all non-commercial use of them. Platinum Open Access means that the authors pay nothing for the editorial work, the color printing, and electronic and paper distribution. To keep this running, the journal requires a low-budget management. It is a non-profit journal owned by the Nordic Orthopaedic Federation, which covers all the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) and the Netherlands and Estonia. Unfortunately the term " Open Access " has been soiled by so-called predatory publishers. This is a quickly growing group of commercial enterprises that rapidly, and electronically only, publish submitted manuscripts for a certain cost to the authors (and considerable economic gain for the company). These companies use no or insufficient peer review (it is of course of no interest to the firms to reject submitted manuscripts), which means that a lot of poor-quality articles are published. Thus, " Open Access " is wrongly considered by many to be a sign of a low-quality journal. For an overview of predatory publishers, see Manuscript handling Acta Orthopaedica has a rigorous peer-review system. All the manuscripts that are accepted have been scrutinized by external expert reviewers, by our biostatistician (who surprisingly often finds a tendency of authors to overestimate the strength and general applicability of their findings!) and by an experienced language/copy editor. Acta receives around 1,000 manuscripts annually, < 15% of which are finally accepted and published. We believe that this selection process leaves only high-quality articles, as reflected by our latest impact factor (2.8, according to Thom-son Reuter's Web of Science), which compares favorably with those of the other large general orthopedic journals. Handling times and App Manuscripts that are not appropriate for Acta's readership or that are of insufficient quality are immediately rejected. Of the others that are sent for peer review, most authors get an answer within 4–8 weeks. Manuscripts accepted after revision(s) are published electronically (PubMed) within a few weeks after the authors have approved the proofs. They can also easily be found with our App (Acta was the first orthopedic journal to be available on an App, in 2011), which also gives access …