About the Journal

Acta Orthopaedica presents articles, from all parts of the world, of basic research interest, as well as clinical studies in the field of orthopedics and related subdisciplines. Ever since the journal was founded in 1930, by a group of Scandinavian orthopedic surgeons, the journal has been published for an international audience. 

Acta articles are printed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0 license) which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the source is credited. This means that Acta has no copyright on your article.

Handling of manuscripts

Acta receives about 600 manuscripts annually; around 20-25% are accepted for publication.

Rejection of submitted manuscripts occurs at 2 levels.

  • 70% immediately by the Editor or co-editor as a desk rejection without peer review. The reason is often that the manuscript does not live up to the standards of Acta Orthopaedica or the subject is outside Acta’s scope.
  • 30% of the manuscripts go into review, of which 10% will be rejected.
  • 20% of the manuscripts will be published

All published manuscripts have been peer-reviewed, commonly by 2 external reviewers and, when appropriate, by our statistical Editors.

Handling times

All desk rejections are within 1-2 days.

The mean time from submission to rejection of peer-reviewed manuscripts is around 2 months.

The mean time from submission to acceptance is, on average, 5 months.

Acceptance times strongly depend on the number of revisions necessary, the review time, and the time authors spend on resubmission.

After acceptance

After acceptance, the manuscript will be further edited by the publishing manager and the editor-in-chief or deputy editor. The time from authors’ approval of last revisions to proofs and until the article is available online (Open Access) on Acta’s website (http://www.actaorthop.org), and registered on PubMed is usually within 2-3 weeks.

Open peer review

Acta applies a transparent review process: author and referee identities are disclosed to one another. There is an option for reviewers to remain anonymous to the authors; however, this is rarely used.

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

In addition, all files will be archived with PubMed Central (PMC) and CLOCKSS .