Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica was started in 1930 by members of the Nordic Orthopedic Federation (NOF, founded in 1919). The journal was intended to be a forum for the “Scandinavian orthopaedic school” (Scandinavia and Nordic are often used synonymously). Acta is a strictly noncommercial journal owned by NOF, which has now grown to be the federation of the national orthopedic associations in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Lithaunia, representing more than 5000 orthopedic surgeons. By contrast, most other journals are owned and managed by high-profit, commercial publishers that produce journals only available at high subscription costs; nonsubscribers must pay a fee to read the articles.
Acta has advanced to become one of the major international general orthopedic journals; accordingly, we dropped “Scandinavica” for our current name, Acta Orthopaedica, in 2005. At the same time, Acta started Open Access, the first of all orthopedic journals to do so. Open Access was not a new concept at that time but it was increasingly gaining momentum and considered by many people, rightly, to be an inevitable development. Acta began so-called Platinum Open Access, which means that all accepted articles are immediately made free on the net for all, with no costs for authors or readers. Moreover, articles are 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. Thus, Acta authors are free to use their articles or images in any non-commercial way, without having to ask permission.
With Acta free on the net we foresaw a substantial decrease in the number of paying subscribers (mainly libraries) to the printed version. This subscription income was necessary for the production and distribution of Acta in printed-paper format, with 6 issues a year.
To mediate information by printed paper—which is put in envelopes and then transported across the world—has become obsolete in many fields for several obvious reasons. We think it is about time also for medical journals to follow suit. There are already some electronic-only journals and Acta will now be one of them.
Consequently, we shall take 2 steps from 2018: We will end the paper version of the annual 6 issues delivered to all our NOF members and introduce a publication fee for authors who are not NOF members, at 1,750 EUR/2,100 USD per article. This fee, necessary to keep Acta a high-quality journal, covers costs for administration of manuscripts, including peer review, copy-editing, desktop setup, and communication with PubMed. Note that many journals today use a hybrid system with no costs for authors when articles are published with no Open Access—and thus available only to subscribers—but with the possibility for authors to acquire Open Access for their article by paying a charge (for most journals higher than the publication fee planned for Acta). Fees are in most cases paid by the authors’ institution or research funding agencies. Many of these agencies promote, or even require, Open Access for research they have funded and ask authors to include publication fees in their grant application. Again, note that there is no publication fee for NOF members who also will still, by email, get an Acta issue every second month. This issue will include all articles in a browsable PDF file.
With these innovations we are convinced of a bright future for the Open Access, electronic, Acta Orthopaedica.
Acta Orthopaedica, Editor Anders Rydholm and the Nordic Orthopaedic Federation, President Li Felländer-Tsai