1 Introduction

After its creation in 1993, the journal of the European Acoustics Association (EAA) has known many progressive transformations. The merger with the journal Acustica in 1996, under the name Acta Acustica united with Acustica (AAuA) allowed a real development based on the traditional model of library subscriptions. After 2010, the support by the national societies was reinforced, affirming the solidarity principle between all European countries. During the Horizon 2020 program (2014–2020), it was imposed to publish the results of research projects in open repositories or journals, and the general assembly of EAA unanimously decided in 2016 to transition to a full Open Access (OA) model in 2020. To implement this change, the journal of the EAA became full OA under the name Acta Acustica with EDP Sciences as publisher.

Acta Acustica is an OA journal that encourages authors to publish preprints in repositories such as arXiv. Furthermore, authors are encouraged to upload supplemental datasets related to their published research to appropriate public data repositories to make their data, code, methods as accessible and reusable as possible.

Acta Acustica is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which is a requirement in several countries to fund the APC of articles published in full open access journals. Depending on the country of affiliation, the author may take advantage of national or local support for publication. In addition, EAA may support authors belonging to affiliated National Societies, and special agreements are in place with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France, German academic institutions including universities and research institutions, and NSLC (National Science Library CAS) the research library service system for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). All the information is detailed on the website of Acta Acustica, see (https://acta-acustica.edpsciences.org/author-information/are-you-entitled-to-a-special-rate).

2 Latest achievements and activities

Acta Acustica has launched a new article type called Audio Articles which allows authors to add audio snippets to a scientific article. Playable sound clips are directly embedded in the PDF and HTML versions of the article in the places indicated by authors. For a demonstrative example, we refer to [1]. Acta Acustica offers the possibility to organize Topical Issues, where the organizers become guest editors to handle the review process. All submitted articles for such a Topical Issues undergo the standard review process, and as soon as an article is accepted, it will be published online. The following two Topical Issues have published respectively 14 and 12 articles.

• Auditory models: from binaural processing to multimodal cognition

• Aeroacoustics: state of art and future trends

• Audio for Virtual and augmented reality

• Selected papers from CFA 2022: 16th French Congress on Acoustics

• The sound of Ancient Theatres

In addition, the first review article has been published, see [2].

Although the journal was continuously indexed in these major databases, it was a great satisfaction when Acta Acustica received its first Impact Factor last year under its new name of 1.355 (Clarivate Web of Science) and a Cite Score 2.5 (Scopus, Elsevier).

A further important achievement is the presence of Acta Acustica on social media, primarily on Twitter (https://twitter.com/ActaAcustica) as well as on Facebook. This presence is coordinated with the publisher’s social media accounts (https://twitter.com/EDPSciences). The communication through social media is still finding its model but aims at advertising the most remarkable articles, the latest publications, developments in the journal and important events in the acoustics calendar. The editorial board believes it can give the research results published in Acta Acustica a broader impact and help it reach a non-specialist audience thus implementing one of the core principle of Open Access. In the future, we will ask authors to provide a representative figure and other information to assist us in promoting their work on social media.

In another initiative to broaden the reach of its open access content, Acta Acustica joined the partnership between ResearchGate and EDP Sciences in 2022 (https://www.researchgate.net/press-newsroom/researchgate-and-edp-sciences-announce-content-partnership). Authors will see their articles added automatically to their publication pages on ResearchGate, giving them access to statistics showing the impact of their work, and enabling them to connect with their readers. As well as simplifying the process of uploading work for authors, this partnership helps make sure that the Version of Record is always available.

3 Statistics

In the following, statistics are discussed to provide a clear overview about the number of submissions, decisions made by the editors, rejection rate, submissions distributed over the categories and countries. Figure 1 displays the total number of submissions for the years 2020 (Acta Acustica just started), 2021 and 2022. The submissions are subdivided into regular submissions and those being submitted to a Topical Issue.

Figure 1 Number of regular submission and number of submissions to a Topical Issue.

It is good to see that the number of submissions increased year on year. Even though Acta Acustica has yet to reach the size of the previous title, this progression is encouraging and our goal is to further increase the number of submissions. Figure 2a displays the regular submissions and submissions to Topical Issue quarterly. The number of submissions via Topical Issue already contributes considerably and so we will further strongly support the organization of Topical Issue. Figure 2b displays the decision of the editors subdivided into direct rejection meaning that the scientific quality is insufficient or the topic does not fit to Acta Acustica, reject, minor revision, major revision and accept. The elapsed time for a first decision made by an editor is displayed in Figure 3a. The number of days for an editor to make a first decision is decreasing. This is an important point, since it is of uttermost importance that the time to the first decision is as short as possible with simultaneous guarantee of the quality of the reviews. Next, Figure 3b displays the rate of rejection over the last three years and one can see a tendency of converge to about 40%. Figure 4 displays the number of submissions as a function of the subjects starting from animal bioacoustics and going to hearing, audiology and psychoacoustics. In addition, the number of submissions to any of the Topical Issue is plotted. Underwater sound, virtual acoustics, musical acoustics, computational and numerical acoustics, ultrasonics, environmental noise and hearing, audiology and psychoacoustics receive above 5 submissions per year, while other topics form a more minor part of the scope. Submissions according to countries are displayed in Figure 5. This clearly positions France, Germany and China as the first three countries or origin of manuscripts.

Figure 2 Regular submissions and submissions to special issues, and decision made by the editors. (a) Submissions; (b) Decisions of editors.

Figure 3 Submission to first decision counted in days, and rejection rate. (a) Submission to first decision. (b) Rejection of rate.

Figure 4 Submissions according to subjects.

Figure 5 Submissions according to countries.

A strong increase from the first to the second year of published articles was observed being 61 articles in 2021 and 2022 (see Fig. 6), which is about half the volume of articles published under the previous title. We are quite confident that the number of articles in 2023 will increase, which can already be seen by a high number of submissions in January 2023. In addition, the general assembly of EAA has decided to promote the possibility to submit extended versions of conference papers as full scientific articles to Acta Acustica.

Figure 6 (a) Number of published articles per year and (b) overview of article processing charge (APC).

Out of 150 papers published in the 2020–2022 period, the European Acoustics Association supported the APCs of 40 articles of their members (including 33 partial support and 7 full support), see Figure 6b. The APCs of 4 articles (2 editorials, 1 book review, 1 review article) were waived by EDP Sciences. The CNRS funded 32 papers for their members. This leaves 74 articles for which the APC was fully funded by the author or their institution. To see if you are entitled to a special rate, please go to https://acta-acustica.edpsciences.org/author-information/are-you-entitled-to-a-special-rate.

The readership of Acta Acustica is increasing year on year, reaching close to 58,000 downloads on EDP Sciences’ platform in 2022 (see Fig. 7), which establishes Acta Acustica as one of the main exchange platforms for science in acoustics.

Figure 7 Number of downloads per year.

The first Audio Article, which was published in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1051/aacus/2021009), was among the top 3 most downloaded articles in 2022. Added to the usage on the publisher’s platform, the content of Acta Acustica is available on other platforms, including ResearchGate. Under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence, anyone can share and adapt the content in any medium or format, provided appropriate credit is given.

References

© The Author(s), published by EDP Sciences, 2023

All Figures

	Figure 1 Number of regular submission and number of submissions to a Topical Issue.
In the text

	Figure 2 Regular submissions and submissions to special issues, and decision made by the editors. (a) Submissions; (b) Decisions of editors.
In the text

	Figure 3 Submission to first decision counted in days, and rejection rate. (a) Submission to first decision. (b) Rejection of rate.
In the text

	Figure 4 Submissions according to subjects.
In the text

	Figure 5 Submissions according to countries.
In the text

	Figure 6 (a) Number of published articles per year and (b) overview of article processing charge (APC).
In the text

	Figure 7 Number of downloads per year.
In the text