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Author information Instructions for authors

Instructions for authors

Online Manuscript Submission

New and revised manuscripts shall be submitted via Editorial Manager, an online manuscript submission and peer review system. Using this system authors can submit manuscripts and track their progress through the system. Reviewers can download manuscripts and submit their comments to the Associate Editor.

To get to the Editorial Manager, please click on Editorial Manager.

  • For further important information about composing a manuscript (e.g. languages, style, format of figures etc.) please go to please go to 2. Manuscripts
  • For further important information about copyright, open access license, please go to the Creative Commons website. For more information about "article processing charges" please go to the bottom of this text.

Instructions for Authors

1. General

1.1. Aims and scope

Acta Acustica, the Journal of the European Acoustics Association (EAA), is an international, peer-reviewed journal on acoustics. Acta Acustica reports on original scientific research in acoustics and on engineering applications.

The journal considers Review Articles, Scientific Articles, Audio Articles, Technical and Applied Articles, Short Communications, Letters to the Editor. Articles can cover all subjects in the field of acoustics, including:

  • General Linear Acoustics
  • Nonlinear Acoustics, Macrosonics
  • Aeroacoustics
  • Atmospheric Sound
  • Underwater Sound
  • Ultrasonics
  • Physical Acoustics
  • Structural Acoustics
  • Noise Control
  • Active Control
  • Environmental Noise
  • Soundscape
  • Building Acoustics
  • Room Acoustics
  • Acoustic Materials and Metamaterials
  • Audio Signal Processing and Transducers
  • Computational and Numerical Acoustics
  • Inverse Problems in Acoustics
  • Hearing, Audiology and Psychoacoustics
  • Speech
  • Musical Acoustics
  • Virtual Acoustics
  • Auditory Quality of Systems
  • Animal bioacoustics
  • History of Acoustics

Along with its long tradition of publication and its mission of dissemination, the EAA is the first Acoustics learned Society to publish its journal in Full Open Access.

The EAA has allocated a budget for supporting individual Members of European Societies for the cost of publication (Article Processing Charge, APC). Rules for support for APC can be found at the bottom of the instructions for authors.

1.2. Conditions of acceptance of a submission

We specially invite participants of EAA supported conferences to submit an extended version of their proceedings publication as full article to Acta Acustica. In doing so, we expect:

  • The submission needs to be significantly extended from the original conference paper, with additional material included and an extended literature review. Articles published in Acta Acustica are typically 8-12 pages long (final typeset length).
  • The extended conference paper needs to be a strong research article with a broader scope and interest than the conference presentation.
  • The authors should indicate that their contribution is an improvement, or extension to their previously published conference paper. The conference paper should be cited in the reference list and throughout the research article.
  • The normal peer review process of the journal will apply.

Submissions of manuscripts previously published on Preprint servers such as arXiv are accepted.

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees.

EDP Sciences is member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Please consult https://publicationethics.org/ for any questions on ethics in publishing.

1.3. Authorship

Especially the ICMJE recommends that all those designated as authors meet all of the criteria they describe. The list of criteria is available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/. Those contributors who do not meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged. Similar information is also provided by the Council of Science Editors.

1.4. Conflict of interest

Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.

Especially publications in Life Sciences and Medicine are invited to be accompanied by the "Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form" at the initial submission.

Any additional conflict of interest, on personal or any other level must also be disclosed. The author is advised to fill out the "Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form", and finishing by "Generate Disclosure Statement". This statement shall be reproduced in the article manuscript.

1.5. Publication Ethics and protection of research participants

All laws and regulations should be strictly followed. If required, authors are requested to indicate ethical declarations issued by their institution and concerning their research, including permit numbers, in the Material and Methods section. Authors are requested to fully comply with the ICMJE recommendations in this respect, particularly with the patient's right to privacy, as well as the necessity to have the patient's written consent.

1.6 Open access

All articles published by Acta Acustica are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Articles are available from the website of the journal. Authors are the copyright holders of their articles. All articles bear the following mention: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

2. Manuscripts

The journal only accepts LaTeX source files. Authors are free to follow any style for the article and references, as long as it is internally consistent. An example on how to build \LaTeX{} source files to be published in Acta Acustica is provided here

2.1. Languages

The only accepted language is English.

2.2. Style

2.2.1. Formatting text

Any submitted manuscript should be in a form that allows the referees efficient study. No special formatting is required, but it should be:

  • easily readable;
  • pages should be consecutively numbered;
  • on each page lines should be numbered;

Formulae should be clearly written using standard symbols which are explained at their first appearance. Nomenclatures or lists of symbols will be dropped.

2.2.2. Figures
2.2.2.1. Figure numbers and legends

Figures should be numbered as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. They are referred to in the text as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Legends are grouped on a separate page.

2.2.2.2. Technical information

All figures are published free of charge (i.e. they are included in the publication fee), including color photographs and diagrams. However, only photographs of scientific interest and pertaining to the subject of the article should be included. Color illustrations, especially diagrams, should be understandable even, if they are printed as grey levels.

Figures should be prepared to be of good quality both when they are viewed onscreen as HTML and when the PDF is printed. Figures may be arranged as "plates", but keep in mind that PDFs are prepared to be printed on A4 pages.

The electronic submission system will accept PNG (preferred), TIFF (with compression), and EPS files, with appropriate resolution (300 dpi for colour photographs, 600 dpi for halftone work, 1200 dpi for line work). JPG format is not recommended - PNG is preferred.

Manuscripts with figures of insufficient technical quality will be immediately sent back for revision by the editorial team and will not begin the review process before correct files are uploaded. In other words, sending a manuscript with incorrect figures will gain nothing and may delay its possible publication.

2.3. Declarations

2.3.1. Funding (recommended)

Please include details on research grants received from funding agencies to complete the research presented. Please provide the research funder(s) and grant number(s).
If no funding received, please state: The authors received no funding to complete this research.

2.3.2. Conflict of Interest (mandatory)

Please disclose any material, financial, or other relationship that might pose a conflict of interest with the reported research. This should be disclosed via a Conflict of Interest form at the time of submission of your manuscript, and via a Conflict of Interest statement within the article. For more information, see section 1.4 Conflict of Interest.
If no conflict of interest, please state: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

2.3.3. Data Availability Statement (mandatory)

Please include a section called Data Availability Statement in your article to inform readers in a structured way about the availability of data or code relevant to the research published in your article. If the authors deposit Appendices or Supplementary Material in a public data repository, include the name of the repository and the link (DOI) here.
For example: "The code for this article is available in Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5211870." See also Data Policy.

2.3.4. Author contributions (recommended)

Please specify which authors designed the study, collected the data, analyzed the results, wrote the paper, and any other contribution. For more information, see CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy).

2.4. Bibliography

Articles submitted to Acta Acustica should cite all relevant work, part of which should have appeared in Acoustics journals such as Acta Acustica. This criterion will be applied to determine whether the article is within scope of the journal.

The number of citations should not exceed 80 except for review papers. References are cited by numbers in rectangular brackets, for example [1, 2]. The reference list is placed at the end of the manuscript. The order of references is according to their appearance in the article. All author names should be included in the reference (cf. References below).

The references shall be presented as the following examples in the reference list:

  • Journal article: F. Wendling, F. Bartolomei, J.-J. Bellanger, P. Chauvel: Interpretation of interdependencies in epileptic signals using a macroscopic physiological model of eeg. Clinical neurophysiology 112 (2001) 1201–1218.
  • Book: I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, A. Courville: Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016
  • Book chapter: A. Amendola, D.E. Bonasia: The menisci: Anatomy, healing response, and biomechanics, in The Knee Joint Bonnin M, Amendola NA, Bellemans J, MacDonald SJ, Menetrey J, Editors Paris, Heidelberg, Springer. 2011

For Latex contributions, if the bibliography is done in an external .bib file, authors are asked to upload both the .bib and the .bbl files obtained by a ”bibtex“ compilation of the main .tex file on their own computer.

The official abbreviation for Acta Acustica is: ”Acta Acust“.

3. Submission

New and revised manuscripts shall be submitted online at the Editorial Manager website (Click here) (see also Author Tutorial an Reviewer Tutorial given by Editorial Manager). The following information will need to be provided during submission:

3.1 Article type

  • NEW ! Audio Articles. Audio Articles are Scientific Articles containing short playable sound clips. Audio Articles comply in all other ways with the description of Scientific Articles, see below. For instructions on how to submit Audio Articles, see section 3.11 Audio Articles.
  • Review Articles discuss the state-of-the-art in an area of acoustics that seems of particular interest to the community at this point in time; review papers should be particularly complete in covering literature and should mention all ideas, models, experiments, even if they do not correspond to the authors own opinion. Before writing a review paper, please contact the Editor-in-Chief.
  • Scientific Articles contain original material (ideas, models, experiments) not published elsewhere, that contributes substantially to the advance of science in the field of acoustics; they should clearly establish the relation between the work reported on, and the state-of-the-art; scientific papers are typically up to 12 pages.
  • Technical and Applied Papers report on original applications of an existing technique, concept, or measurement method to a new area; it is essential that a technical and applied paper is of sufficient interest to a group of researchers and engineers beyond the specific application or geographic area.
  • Short Communications are short scientific papers not longer than 4 typeset pages; one can use a short communication to report on original, new ideas, models, or experimental results, that do not require a substantial discussion; they are NOT scientific papers of poor quality. Articles of more than 4 typeset pages will be invoiced at the rate of regular articles.
  • Letters to the Editor are promoted as a forum to stimulate scientific discussion; typically they contain critical comments on or additions to published work by the author or his/her peers; they may also introduce new ideas for future research with preliminary results without the proof required for a scientific paper; the scientific level needs nevertheless be guaranteed.
  • Book Reviews are short (1 page maximum, approximately 450 words without title and signature), independent reviews of published books. Before writing a book review, please contact the Editor-in-Chief.

3.2 Title

The manuscript title should be chosen carefully to reflect the content of the manuscript. No claims for novelty should appear in the title.

3.3 Author(s) and their affiliation

The corresponding author should be fully registered in the online manuscript handling system. For other authors that are not registered, entering name, email address and affiliation will be asked.

3.4 Field (Section/Category)

Manuscripts will be published and indexed under this Field in Acta Acustica, cf. Section 1.1.

3.5 Abstract and conclusion

The abstract should be a brief and precise representation of the content of your manuscript. The choice of wording is of utmost importance since searching in different indexes is mainly based on the abstract text. The abstract must be limited to 200 words for Papers, or to 100 words for Letters to the Editor and Short Communications. It shall be presented in a structured manner, according to the IMRAD structure, containing: Introduction, Methods, Results And Discussion. An example of a structured abstract can be found here.

The conclusion summarizes the consequences of the work. It differs from the summary. Authors need to distinguish ”The method XXX has been applied...“ from ”The method XXX allows to...“ or ”The method XXX is limited by...“, for example.

3.6 Statement concerning the originality of the work

A manuscript can only be considered for publication, if it is not under review or already published with another journal, as a whole or in substantial part. Previous submission to another journal is no objection, but the reason for submitting to Acta Acustica should be clarified.

The same applies for manuscripts previously published on Preprint servers. These submissions are considered as original.

3.7 Comments to the Editorial Office (optional)

Optionally, additional comments to the editorial board can be added. These comments will not be forwarded to the reviewers.

3.8 Suggested reviewers

The author is requested to suggest three reviewers. The editors are free to follow these suggestions or not. Please do not suggest three reviewers from the same country. Optionally, the author can oppose possible reviewers. Please give a good reason to oppose a reviewer. The editors reserve the right to ignore these objections.

3.9 Downloading files

Files containing the manuscript and figures should be uploaded online. At least one item ”Manuscript“ should be attached to the submission. If multiple documents are added, they will be included in the automatically generated PDF file used for review in the order given in the submission.

Figures should be submitted as separate files, a vector graphic format is required except for photographs. In the event of any problems while uploading a manuscript, please contact the Editor-in-Chief's office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Once the above information is entered into the system, a manuscript PDF file will be generated. The submitting author should approve this automatically built file. Your manuscript will then be assigned a manuscript number and the Editor-in-Chief will forward it to an appropriate Associate Editor. The Associate Editor will send the manuscript to referees, supervise the reviewing process and inform you of his/her decision. Final disposition is up to the Editor-in-Chief. You can follow the review process at any time by logging in to the EM website, https://www.editorialmanager.com/aacus/.

3.10 Electronic Supplementary Material

Authors can submit Supplementary Material (SM) to complement their article. This might include additional figures or examples, animations, movies, audio, data sets used in the paper, computer code used to generate figures or tables, or other materials. SM is information that will be useful to a subset of readers, but is not essential to comprehension of the main results of the published article.

All files must be submitted electronically at the same time as the submission of the associated article. A simple naming convention should be used for files (e.g. suppl1.wav, suppl2.mp4, ...). In the submitted paper, the supplementary material has to be announced at the right place, and, at least, in a special, non-numbered, section entitled "Supplementary material", immediately after the section "Acknowledgement".

The journal encourages the use of open data repositories to make additional research data publicly available, please see above. Whenever possible please consider depositing your data to an open data repository instead of uploading data as supplementary material to be published online alongside your article.

3.11 Audio Articles

Acta Acustica has launched a new article type called “Audio Articles”. Audio Articles are scientific articles with associated audio files. If your article is accepted, playable sound clips will be embedded in the PDF and HTML versions of your article in the places you have indicated. See the following example of Audio Article https://doi.org/10.1051/aacus/2021009.

Data deposition. In addition to uploading audio files with your article, your audio files should also be uploaded in an appropriate public data repository, where they will be available to readers of your article in case readers are unable to play the mp3 files embedded in the PDF.

Preparation of your article. Please prepare short audio files in .mp3 format. Your manuscript should indicate clearly in the body of the text where the audio files are to be inserted, with “Audio file 1”, “Audio file 2”, etc. Please ensure that the audio files are labelled the same way as they are cited in the text, e.g. “Audio file 1.mp3”, “Audio file2.mp3” etc. Your manuscript should include a section titled Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the References, for example:

Data Availability Statement

  • The sound files associated with this article are available in [Name of public data repository], under the reference [DOI or other data identifier]

Submission of your article. Please submit your article under the article type “Audio Article”. Please ensure that you upload audio files alongside your manuscript file. Please also ensure that you indicate in the appropriate field the reference of your sound files in a public data repository.

Proof correction. Following acceptance of your article, you will receive proofs for correction. These proofs will incorporate the playable audio clips, identified with an audio file icon. The display of these audio files depends on the software used on your computer. Authors are responsible for checking that the correct audio files are embedded in their article in the correct place. Your proofs will include the following footnote:

  • Audio files are embedded in this PDF file. The display of these audio files depends on the software used on your computer. Please refer to the Adobe acrobat page for more explanations. You can also find the audio files at [DOI of the data repository].

4. Special issues

For topics of special interest, the Editor-in-Chief can decide to publish a special issue (or a special section in a regular issue). Proposals should be submitted to him. The following rules apply: two Associate Editors from two different countries are appointed; authors of several countries are invited to submit a paper; the peer-review process is regular; the paper format is the format of regular papers.

5. Proofs, Copyright, License to publish and Offprints

5.1. Proofs

Proofs will be sent to the person indicated as the corresponding author at submission of the manuscript on the first page of the manuscript. The corrected proofs should be returned within 8 days; corrections should be carefully done and clearly indicated. No new material can be inserted in the text at the time of proof reading.

5.2. Copyright and license to publish

The submitting/corresponding author will need to fill out and sign the license agreement for the journal and return it to the publisher. The license indicates that the author retains © and that the license to publish is CC BY 4.0. The corresponding author will receive the document during the production process.

5.3. Offprints

As soon as the article has been published in Acta Acustica complimentary copy of the article in PDF format will be sent to the corresponding author.

6. Open Access publication, Fees

6.1. Open Access

Since the relaunch of Acta Acustica in 2020, all articles are published in Open Access. The main change related to Open Access is that the cost of publication is transferred from the journal subscribers to the authors of articles or their institution. The open access fee (also known as APC, Article Processing Charge) covers the costs involved in the open access publication, such as editorial handling, copyediting, data management, proofs, administrative overheads and technologies in order to make your article findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

6.2. Fees

See the current APCs for publication in Acta Acustica here.

The European Acoustics Association (EAA) and the Publisher, EDP Sciences, are working together to provide a range financial of support for authors. Please see here if you are entitled to a special rate, discount or waiver.

7. Article promotion

Acta Acustica supports authors in the promotion of their work, by posting about all published articles on twitter (@ActaAcustica).

To assist the community manager in creating compelling posts on social media, you are requested to provide a suitable image for the promotion of your article, at the time you submit the revision of your manuscript. This can be a representative image from your article, a visual abstract designed for this purpose, or any other image provided it is not under copyright. If you are on twitter, please also provide your twitter username (“handle”) in the relevant field at this time.

8. Addresses

Correspondence concerning manuscript status should be directed to the Editor-in-Chief:

Univ.-Prof. Dr. techn. Dr. h.c. Manfred Kaltenbacher Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), Institute of Fundamentals and Theory in Electrical Engineering, Inffeldgasse 188010 Graz, Austria. Email : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Inquiries concerning manuscript style, file formats, layout of tables and figures and of the final paper may be sent to the Production Manager:

Publisher: EDP Sciences 17, av. du Hoggar - BP 112 91944 Les Ulis Cdx A France Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

References

[1] B. C. J. Moore, Gockel: Factors influencing sequential stream segregation. Acta Acust united Ac 88 (2001) 320-333.

[2] L. Cremer, H. A. Müller: Principles and applications of room acoustics. Chapman and Hall, London, 1982.