1 Introduction

The journal of the European Acoustics Association (EAA), founded in 1993, has been fully Open Access (OA) since 2020 under the name Acta Acustica, published by EDP Sciences. As an OA journal, the journal fully embraces the practice of preprints in repositories such as arXiv, and authors are encouraged to upload supplementary datasets related to their research to an appropriate public data repository. Since mid-2023, it is mandatory to include a data availability statement in all articles published in Acta Acustica.

Acta Acustica is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and has obtained the DOAJ Seal of Approval. Depending on the country of affiliation, the corresponding author may take advantage of national or local support for publication, and EAA may support authors belonging to National Societies. For the full list of waivers and discounts available, see Acta Acustica (edpsciences.org).

In late 2023, the EAA and EDP Sciences set up a working group to discuss the possibility to transition from a Gold to a Diamond open access model. In the latter, all authors may publish in the journal without Article Processing Charges. For this to happen, publication costs need to be covered by a funder, or a consortium of funders.

2 Latest Achievements and Activities

Acta Acustica offers the possibility to organize Topical Issues, where the organizers become guest editors to handle the review process. For the publication of Topical Issues curated by Guest Editors, Acta Acustica adheres to the DOAJ criteria for Special Issues. All submitted articles undergo the standard review process, and articles are published online as soon as they are accepted. Since our last Editorial letter in 2023, one new Topical Issue Selected papers from CFA 2022: 16th French Congress on Acoustics has been published, and six new ones are in progress (details see here):

• Vibroacoustics

• Virtual acoustics

• The Sound of Ancient Theatres

• Active Noise and Vibration Control

• Numerical, computational and theoretical acoustics

• Advancements in Ultrasonic NDT: From Pulse-Echo to Integrating AI for Smart Control

• Musical Acoustics: Latest Advances in Analytical, Numerical and Experimental Methods Tackling Complex Phenomena in Musical Instruments.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the organisers of the EAA’s Forum Acusticum 2023 conference in Torino, Arianna Astolfi and Francesco Asdrubali, as five of the six new Topical Issues are the result of this conference.

Acta Acustica is indexed in all the major indexing databases. It received a first impact factor of 1.45 under its new title by Clarivate Web of Science. It has a CiteScore of 2.5 in Scopus, Elsevier.

A further important achievement is the presence of Acta Acustica on social media: Twitter @ActaAcustica and LinkedIn posts. The editorial team uses such network to advertise the newly published articles, linking them to the authors or laboratories accounts whenever possible, and to promote the different Topical Issues organized. Since a few months, a new item of the submission form allows authors to indicate their handles on social media so that the discussion on their work can continue there. We believe that an Open Access journal and advertisement of the published work can foster exchanges between researchers and improve the overall outreach of the journal.

3 Statistics

In the following, we provide an overview of the number of submissions, decisions made by the editors, rejection rate, submissions distributed over sections, countries, number of articles published, and downloads. Figure 1 displays the total number of submissions for the years 2020 to 2023. The submissions are subdivided into regular submissions and those part of a Topical Issue. The number of submissions is increasing, although the numbers differ just by one between 2022 and 2023. Figure 2 displays the regular submissions and submissions to Topical Issue quarterly. The number of submissions via Topical Issue contributes significantly to the content.

Figure 1 Number of regular submissions (in blue) and submissions to a Topical Issue (orange). Color online.

Figure 2 Regular submissions (in blue) and submissions to Topical Issue (in orange) by quarter. Color online.

Figure 3 shows the decision of the editors, subdivided into direct rejection, which means that the scientific quality is insufficient or the topic does not fit Acta Acustica, rejection, minor revision, major revision and acceptance. The elapsed time for a first decision by an editor is shown in Figure 4a, which also includes the elapsed time for inviting reviewers. The time between submission and a first decision by an editor is decreasing. It is important that the time to the first decision is as short as possible while simultaneously ensuring the quality of the reviews. Next, Figure 4b displays the rate of rejection over the last four years, which is about 45% on average. Figure 5 shows the number of submissions by subjects (sections of the journal), from Animal Bioacoustics to Hearing, Audiology and Psychoacoustics.

Figure 3 Decisions of editors by quarter. Color online.

Figure 4 Time between submission to first decision (in days), and rejection rate. (a) Time to reviewers invitation and first decision. (b) Rejection rate.

Figure 5 Submissions received by section of the journal (years 2020–2023).

Most Sections receive a good number of submissions. The three most popular categories are Hearing, Audiology and Psychoacoustics, Musical Acoustics, and Environmental Noise. The number of submissions by countries is presented in Figure 6. It is noticeable that many countries submit very few articles, even though some of them have a strong acoustics society. Figure 7 shows the number of articles published per country. The top four publishing countries are France, Germany, China and Austria. Figure 8 shows the number of articles published, broken into regular vs. topical issues. Topical issues, either arising from acoustics conferences, or cross-disciplinary thematic collections, are important for the journal, contributing around 30% of the published content in recent years. In 2023, we also published two new Audio Articles, our innovative article format with embedded playable audio files.

Figure 6 Submissions to the journal by countries (years 2020–2023).

Figure 7 Number of published articles from 2020 to 2023 according to countries.

Figure 8 Number of articles published, broken into regular and topical issues.

Figure 9 shows the number of full-text downloads from the publication platform of the journal hosted by EDP Sciences. Usage has increased by 40% between 2022 and 2023, reaching close to 100,000 in 2023. This reflects additional content available on the platform every year, as well as increased dissemination of the content worldwide. Apart from EDP Sciences’s platform, the full open access content published by Acta Acustica since 2020 is available on ResearchGate as part of a content syndication program. Documenta Acustica Electronica (DAEL), the portal of the European Acoustics Association, hosts both recent content of the journal and the archives of the journal in its different forms since 1951.

Figure 9 Number of full text downloads on the publication platform hosted by EDP Sciences.

4 Conclusion and outlook

In 2024, we will continue to develop the journal in terms of both size and impact. We will continue to focus on creating a high quality and high integrity journal, in a context of increasing threats to research integrity worldwide, as well as increasing availability of intelligent tools for publishing. Finally, we will continue to explore opportunities to eliminate Author Processing Charges, allowing authors to publish in the journal regardless of funding available in their institution and country thus contributing to an evermore inclusive acoustic community.

© The Author(s), published by EDP Sciences, 2024

All Figures

	Figure 1 Number of regular submissions (in blue) and submissions to a Topical Issue (orange). Color online.
In the text

	Figure 2 Regular submissions (in blue) and submissions to Topical Issue (in orange) by quarter. Color online.
In the text

	Figure 3 Decisions of editors by quarter. Color online.
In the text

	Figure 4 Time between submission to first decision (in days), and rejection rate. (a) Time to reviewers invitation and first decision. (b) Rejection rate.
In the text

	Figure 5 Submissions received by section of the journal (years 2020–2023).
In the text

	Figure 6 Submissions to the journal by countries (years 2020–2023).
In the text

	Figure 7 Number of published articles from 2020 to 2023 according to countries.
In the text

	Figure 8 Number of articles published, broken into regular and topical issues.
In the text

	Figure 9 Number of full text downloads on the publication platform hosted by EDP Sciences.
In the text