Published by Informa plc. ISSN (printed): 1745-3674. ISSN (electronic): 1745-3682.

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 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (CC-BY-NC 4.0 license) which permits any noncommercial 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 700 manuscripts annually; around 20% are accepted for publication.

Rejection of submitted manuscripts occurs at 3 levels: immediately by the Editor (desk rejection without peer-review; (e.g., many case reports, retrospective small case series, meta-analyses comprising few eligible studies, conclusions not supported by findings, subject outside Acta’s scope)), or immediately by a Co-editor with expert knowledge without peer review (desk rejection), or after peer review. After this process around 20% of the manuscripts remain and are published (see Figure).

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 2 weeks, often within days.

The mean time from submission to rejection (of peer reviewed manuscripts) is 6 weeks.

The mean time from submission to acceptance is 4 months and < 6 months for more than 90% of the manuscripts. Acceptance times strongly depend on the number of revisions necessary (typically 1 or 2) and the time taken by authors to do these revisions.

The time from authors’ approval of proofs until the article is available online (Open Access) on Acta’s website (http://www.actaorthop.org) is < 2 weeks, and 1–2 weeks thereafter the article is registered on PubMed.

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 .