Happy birthday, Acta!

Open Access-This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the source is credited. Perspective 80 years ago, Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica was founded by an enlightened group of orthopedists who thought that Scan-dinavia also needed an orthopedics journal. Already from the beginning, they understood that orthopedics and science were international matters, and for many years Acta articles were therefore published in either English, French, or German, with abstracts in all languages. This international view was merely confirmed a couple of years ago, when we decided to drop " Scandinavica " , since for a long time most of the manuscripts had been coming from countries outside Scandinavia. The name change to Acta Orthopaedica also marked that the Neth-erlands and Estonia had joined the Nordic Orthopaedic Federation (originally an alliance between the national orthopedic societies of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), which owns Acta Orthopaedica, a non-profit journal. Our ownership gives us a certain amount of freedom to make our own decisions. When the Acta board a couple of years ago decided that we should go free on the internet, without any cost to authors, our esteemed publisher (Informa Healthcare) became worried; the poor house was around the corner! When we as the owners insisted, the publisher said: " OK, do that, but just as long as you don't tell anybody! " However, knowledge is like manure—it doesn't do any good if it is not spread widely. Acta articles are now searchable in PubMed as soon as the proofs are ready. Of course, this reduces the number of subscriptions. So far, we have managed to make ends meet, but some time in the future we may have to rely on a small page charge. Anyway, it will be a reasonable cost considering what many commercial journals charge authors today. We still believe that paper journals will outlive their read-ers—at least the elderly ones. We still print a paper edition; the bulk of these books are sent to the members of the Federation and to a number of libraries. But the internet is the stage for science. Searchability and swiftness make up for the nice-looking leather-backed volumes that have been around since 1930. Today, you have the entire Acta production since the very start in 1930 at your fingertips (http://informahealthcare. com/ort). If they had …