Acta Radiologica Open

About Acta Radiologica Open

Acta Radiologica Open — Journal Profile

Overview

Acta Radiologica Open is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open-access journal in diagnostic and interventional radiology, published by SAGE Publications in association with the Nordic Society of Medical Radiology. The JournalsWorld record for this title, post 606507, carries a single ISSN, 2058-4601, and that number is confirmed by the ISSN Portal, which lists the title proper as Acta radiologica open, the medium as online, the issuing body as the Nordic federation of medical radiology societies, the country as the United Kingdom, and the language as English. The same ISSN appears in the DOI pattern of its recent articles — recent Crossref records shown on the JournalsWorld page carry DOIs in the 10.1177/20584601… sequence — so the identity of this record is unusually easy to check: title, ISSN and DOI stem all point to the same SAGE journal.

The journal is the open-access companion to Acta Radiologica, the long-established Nordic radiology journal founded in 1921. Where the parent title is a subscription journal with a print tradition, the Open title exists to publish sound radiology work quickly, freely and in a fully citable form, without a page budget and without a paywall for readers. Its readers are radiologists, nuclear medicine physicians, medical physicists, radiation oncologists, ultrasound specialists and the clinicians who depend on imaging — surgeons, oncologists, emergency physicians, obstetricians, cardiologists and others — as well as researchers working on imaging methods, contrast media and image analysis.

Understanding this journal means understanding that distinction. It is not a lesser annex and it is not a repository for rejected work. From its relaunch editorial onward, the journal has stressed that it shares an editorial board and a peer-review standard with the parent journal, and that the difference is one of format and access rather than of rigour. A case report that teaches a clear imaging lesson, a short study that answers a narrow technical question, a pictorial review that helps a general radiologist recognise an uncommon pattern — these are central to its mission, alongside full original research.

History and name

The title began in 2012 as Acta Radiologica Short Reports. That first name described its early content well: short communications and case reports formed the bulk of what arrived. Within a few years the submissions had broadened. Original research articles, review articles and pictorial essays were arriving in growing numbers, and the editors judged that a name centred on short reports misdescribed the journal and might deter authors with longer work. In 2015, beginning with volume 4, issue 2, the journal was renamed Acta Radiologica Open. The ISSN Portal record captures that moment precisely: it dates this ISSN from 2015 and notes that the description is based on volume 4, issue 2 of February 2015.

The word “Open” in the new name does two jobs. It signals open access — every accepted article is free for anyone to read and download — and it signals openness of format, a welcome for the full range of manuscript types used in radiology rather than only one length. The relaunch editorial, written by the chief editor at the time, Arnulf Skjennald, explained that all manuscript types were welcome, that accepted work would appear within a short time frame, and that the journal would be indexed in PubMed. That combination — breadth, speed and free reading — remains the clearest short description of what the journal set out to be.

The parent journal’s history gives the Open title an inherited audience and an inherited network of reviewers across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, the five national societies that make up the Nordic federation. Yet the Open journal is international in authorship. Recent issues include work from Japan, Finland, the United States, Türkiye, Switzerland and many other countries, reflecting how case material and imaging research now circulate: a rare presentation imaged in one health system teaches readers in every other system that uses the same scanners and the same protocols.

Scope: imaging in all its forms

The journal publishes work on diagnostic and interventional procedures based on all medical imaging techniques, and on physiology and physics when they relate to imaging. In practice that scope divides into several large territories, each of which could sustain a journal of its own.

Cross-sectional and general diagnostic imaging. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging dominate modern radiology, and they dominate this journal as well. Articles evaluate new sequences, faster protocols, dose reduction, reconstruction methods — including, in recent years, deep-learning reconstruction — and the diagnostic performance of imaging for particular diseases. A study of an accelerated T2-weighted prostate MRI technique, work on diffusion findings in placenta accreta spectrum, and research on relaxation times in cardiac MRI in a healthy Finnish population all illustrate the pattern: a defined imaging question, a defined population or phantom or cohort, and an answer another department could apply.

Interventional radiology. Image-guided treatment is the second pillar. Embolisation, ablation, drainage, biopsy and vascular interventions appear regularly, often as case series or technical reports from single centres. Reports on transcatheter arterial embolisation for gastroepiploic artery aneurysms, on a prone transradial approach for radiofrequency ablation of a liver tumour after chemoembolisation, and on CT-guided bone biopsy yield and complications show the genre at its most useful: honest accounts of how a procedure performed, in how many patients, with what success and what harm.

Breast, oncological and screening imaging. Cancer detection is a recurring theme, from missed and interval cancers on digital breast tomosynthesis screening mammograms to CT referrals and cancer detection in patients referred by general practitioners with non-specific symptoms. Such work speaks to health systems as much as to individual diagnosis, because screening and referral pathways are where imaging meets population health, waiting lists and cost.

Case reports and pictorial reviews. Rare disease remains the journal’s historic heartland. A single well-imaged case — an uncommon disease with thoraco-abdominal involvement, an unusual pancreatitis-associated syndrome with joint, skin and bone findings, extrapulmonary tuberculosis manifestations in Asia — can be the most citable teaching material a radiologist encounters that month. Pictorial reviews organise such material into patterns, helping readers build the visual library on which diagnostic confidence depends.

Physics, physiology and methods. Work on imaging physics, contrast media, quantitative imaging, artificial intelligence assessment of vascular calcification, and the methodology of radiology trials themselves also belongs here. A protocol for a scoping review mapping outcomes in randomised radiology trials is a good example of the journal publishing reflection on how the field should study itself, not only results within it.

Article types and what each one must do

Original research articles carry the journal’s evidence base. They need a clear question, a defensible method, ethical approval where human or animal work is involved, and reporting that lets a reader judge bias for themselves: how patients were selected, how images were read, whether readers were blinded, and how the reference standard was set. Review articles and pictorial reviews must organise a field rather than merely summarise it, with images chosen for teaching value and legends that explain what to look at. Case reports must earn their place through rarity, novelty of presentation or imaging finding, or a clear lesson; a routine case described routinely does not meet that bar. Short reports and technical notes suit focused observations — a modification to a protocol, an early experience with a device, a pitfall worth warning about — where the message is sound but narrow.

That range has practical consequences for authors choosing between this journal and its parent. A large, definitive study aimed at changing practice across the specialty may be aimed first at the parent title or another high-selectivity journal. A solid, well-reported study of regional or technical interest, a valuable case series, or teaching material with strong images fits the Open title naturally, and will be read more widely there because no subscription stands between the article and the clinician searching for it at the point of need.

Peer review, editing and production

SAGE’s submission guidelines for the journal describe a conventional scholarly route: submission through the publisher’s system, editorial assessment, peer review, a contributor publishing agreement on acceptance, payment of the article processing charge, then production, with proofs sent to the corresponding author as a PDF to check carefully. The guidelines note an average of about 25 days from completion of production steps to online appearance once the charge has been processed, and they stress that no production work begins before that payment is received — a sequencing detail authors planning around grant deadlines or reporting dates should note early rather than late.

Editorial leadership has been drawn from senior Nordic radiology. The scope statement long associated the journal with Professor Henrik S. Thomsen and a distinguished board, and the 2015 relaunch was announced by Arnulf Skjennald as chief editor, who also edited the parent journal. Authors should consult the current masthead on the SAGE site before submitting, because editor names change over time and this profile does not treat a historic masthead as a current one. What has not changed is the structural point: the Open journal was set up to use the same board and the same review approach as the main journal, so a submission is judged by radiologists working in the same specialty community.

Open access, charges and licensing

This is a gold open-access journal. Reading is free, permanently, with no page-count constraint on the online article, and each article is published in fully citable form with a DOI as soon as production is complete. The cost of that model falls on the author side through an article processing charge payable after acceptance. Secondary listings have put the charge at 800 GBP, but charges are revised over time and depend on agreements between SAGE and institutions, so the only safe practice is to confirm the current figure in the SAGE guidelines for this journal at the moment of submission, and to check whether the corresponding author’s institution has an open-access agreement with SAGE that covers or discounts it. Eligibility for such agreements is determined by the corresponding author’s affiliation at acceptance.

Authors should also check, before submission, what licence their funder requires and what licence the journal offers at acceptance, and should keep the signed publishing agreement with their grant records. For clinical imaging work there is a second, often overlooked compliance point: images must be anonymised, consent for publication of identifiable material must be documented where required, and case reports in particular should be written so that a patient cannot be recognised from the combination of rare diagnosis, institution and dates.

Indexing and discoverability

The journal’s articles are discoverable through the major biomedical routes a radiologist actually uses. Listings for the title record indexing in PubMed, Embase, the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and its articles carry Crossref DOIs that feed library discovery systems worldwide. The JournalsWorld page itself demonstrates that machinery working: recent articles are matched automatically by ISSN through Crossref, which is exactly why keeping the ISSN correct on a directory record matters.

On metrics, this profile is deliberately restrained. Third-party sites quote impact scores and CiteScore-style figures for this title, and those figures change with each annual release and each database’s method. A number copied from an aggregator, without a year and a named source, would mislead more than it informed, so no specific metric is asserted here. Readers who need a metric for a tenure file, a grant application or a library decision should take it directly from Journal Citation Reports, Scopus or SCImago for the year in question and cite that source and year alongside the number. The absence of a quoted number in this profile is a statement about verification, not about the journal’s standing.

Who should submit, and who should read

The natural author is a radiologist, imaging researcher or imaging-adjacent clinician with work that is complete, honest and useful, but whose contribution is breadth, teaching value, technical clarity or a well-documented uncommon case rather than a field-changing trial. Trainees are well served by it: a first case report or a supervised audit of biopsy yield learns the full discipline of submission, review, revision and proof-checking in a journal where the article will then be freely readable by the colleagues the trainee most wants to reach. Departments in health systems without broad subscription access benefit twice — as readers who can use everything the journal publishes, and as authors whose work becomes visible without a paywall.

For readers, the journal rewards browsing by problem rather than by subspecialty label. A general radiologist on call, a breast imager reviewing interval cancer patterns, an interventionalist comparing approaches to an uncommon aneurysm, a physicist checking how a reconstruction method behaved in practice — each will find material filed under one title because the journal organises itself around imaging as a shared craft.

Distinguishing this journal from similar titles

Three confusions recur. First, Acta Radiologica itself is a different journal, with print ISSN 0284-1851 and online ISSN 1600-0455; citations to it must not be assigned to the Open title. Second, Acta Radiologica Short Reports is this journal’s former name, not a separate current journal — pre-2015 citations under that name belong to the same lineage, continued under the new title from volume 4 in 2015, with a new ISSN for the renamed online title. Third, the many other Acta journals in medicine and science share only a Latin naming convention; they have no connection with this title. In every case the ISSN settles the question: 2058-4601 is this journal, and only this journal.

Frequently asked questions

Is Acta Radiologica Open the same as Acta Radiologica? No. They are companion titles from the same Nordic radiology community and publisher, with different ISSNs, different access models and different records. Check the ISSN before citing.

Is the journal really open access? Yes. Articles are free to read and download on publication, funded by a charge payable on acceptance. Confirm the current charge and any institutional agreement before you submit.

Does it still publish case reports? Yes. Case reports were its founding content and remain welcome, provided the case teaches something — rarity, a new imaging observation, or a clear diagnostic lesson.

How fast is publication? The journal was designed for prompt publication, articles appear online as soon as production is complete rather than waiting for an issue, and SAGE’s guidelines describe production in terms of weeks. Exact timelines vary with review and revision, and no responsible profile can promise a date for an individual manuscript.

Where should I verify current details? On the journal’s SAGE homepage and its submission guidelines — the authoritative source for the current editor, charge, licence options and manuscript requirements — and on the ISSN Portal record for 2058-4601 for the bibliographic identity used in this profile.

A practical submission checklist

Authors who prepare carefully tend to move through review with fewer avoidable delays. Start with the images, because in this journal the images are evidence, not decoration: select the key slices and views, annotate findings clearly, state modality, plane and sequence or phase in every legend, and confirm that no identifying information survives in a corner of a frame or in file metadata. Next, write the methods so another department could repeat the study — scanner class, protocol parameters where they matter, reader experience, blinding, and the reference standard against which imaging was judged. Report the denominator honestly: how many cases were screened, how many excluded, and why. For case reports, add a short discussion that places the case against previously published cases and states, in plain terms, what a reader should do differently after reading it. For reviews, search more than one database, say how studies were chosen, and resist the temptation to list findings without weighing their quality. Finally, before submitting, re-read SAGE’s current guidelines for this journal for word limits, abstract structure, reporting checklists, ethics and consent wording, data statements and the exact charge and licence arrangements that will apply if the work is accepted. Guidelines are revised, and the version that governs a submission is the version in force when it is made, not the version remembered from a previous paper in a different journal. Doing that final check, and keeping copies of approvals, consent forms and the publishing agreement together, is the unglamorous work that makes the difference between a smooth publication and a stalled one.