Forum for Nordic Dermato-Venereology Nr 4, 2019 | Page 7

ActaDV 100 Year
ActaDV 100 Years – An Incomplete History and Current Status
of the Journal
A nders V ahlquist
Chairman of the Society for Publication of Acta Dermato-Venereologica, Emeritus Professor of Derma-
tology and Venereology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: [e-mail]
The advance of medical science during the early 1900s inspired many clinical disciplines to issue new multi-lin-
gual periodicals in Scandinavia. To highlight an international ambition, several of the journals were given
Latin names, Acta Chirurgica, Acta Paediatrica, etcetera. Following this trend, Acta Dermato-Venereologica
(ActaDV) was founded in 1920 by Professor Johan Almkvist at Karolinska Institutet. Below, important milestones
in Acta DV´s development over 100 years are described together with fresh information about the journal´s
performance and planned centenary activities.
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Fig. 1. The changing face of Acta Dermato-Venereologica. Left to right: Year 1920, 1936, 1985, 1989, 2002, and 2019.
Examples of ActaDV’s front pages during one hundred years
are shown above. From the start in 1920, ActaDV was privately
owned by Johan Almkvist (Fig. 2), who occupied the only Swed-
ish Chair in Dermatology and Syphilidology at the time. The
journal was initially trilingual (English, French, German) with
appointed co-editors from Finland, the Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. For over a decade the journal
content was dominated by syphilis and its skin manifestations,
later outweighed by papers on more general topics of Derma-
tology and Venereology.
In 1936, Sven Hellerström, professor in spe at Karolinska
Institutet, took over as editor (see Fig. 2). Except for an under-
standable decline during the war (volume 23 combines papers
from both 1942 and 1943), the journal subsequently prospered
with many contributions now coming from outside Europe.
Hence English became compulsory for ActaDV.
After an astonishing 33 years as editor, Hellerström handed
over to Nils Thyresson, the new professor at Karolinska in 1969
(see Fig. 2). Concurrently, ActaDV was donated to a newly
started, non-profit Swedish society with a sole responsibility
of publishing the journal. Together with his wife Inga-Lisa (as
editorial secretary) and a board consisting of the chairpersons
Forum for Nord Derm Ven 2019, Vol. 24, No. 4
of Dermatology and Venereology in the Nordic countries,
Nils Thyresson further developed ActaDV into an esteemed
and steadily growing journal. On retirement, he moved the
editorial office to his private home in Uppsala and continued
as editor for another 6 years.
In 1988, Professor Lennart Juhlin of Uppsala University took
over as editor and recruited Ms Agneta Andersson as edito-
rial assistant & manager, a position she has now held for 32
years(!). Together they modernized the journal both in terms
of lay-out (see Fig. 1) and handling of manuscripts, all in
co-operation with Scandinavian University Press and later
Taylor & Francis (TF) as publisher. In parallel, the ActaDV so-
ciety started Forum for Nordic Dermatology and Venereology.
By attracting more advertisements from industry, this journal
could partially balance the falling revenues from subscriptions
seen also for many other medical journals in the 1990s (this
was largely due to economic constraints imposed on public
libraries and an increase in digital reading).
In 1999, when I took over as editor of ActaDV, the economy
was steadily problematic and our long-standing contract with
TF was felt like a straight-jacket, financially as well as publici-
ty-wise. Hence, in 2003 the Board decided that ActaDV should
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