The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) is not a publishing house in the sense that Elsevier or Springer Nature are. It is the professional and scientific society for physical therapy in the United States - founded in 1921, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and representing more than 100,000 physical therapists, physical therapist assistants, and students. Its publishing footprint is deliberately narrow: one flagship peer-reviewed journal, plus a wider family of academy and section journals that carry the APTA community but are produced by partner publishers.

That flagship is PTJ: Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Journal, founded in 1921 alongside the association itself and renamed to its current title around APTA's 2021 centennial. Since January 2017 PTJ has been co-published with Oxford University Press, which handles production, hosting, licensing, and the open-access infrastructure while APTA retains editorial ownership. If you are a rehabilitation researcher deciding where to send a clinical trial, a measurement-property study, or a systematic review, PTJ is usually the first APTA venue to consider - and the rest of this guide explains how it works.

• PTJ: Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Journal - the only journal APTA publishes directly. Online-only and continuously published, meaning accepted articles appear as soon as they are finalised rather than waiting for a fixed issue. Coverage spans roughly two dozen subject areas including neurology, orthopaedics, paediatrics, geriatrics, oncology, pain, health services, and health policy. Article types include original research, systematic and scoping reviews, trial protocols, quality-improvement studies, measurement-property evaluations, case reports, Perspectives, and Points of View.
• Academy and section journals - APTA's federated structure includes state chapters and roughly 18 specialty academies and sections. Several of these publish their own journals through commercial partners such as Wolters Kluwer. These are APTA-community journals rather than APTA-published journals, and their fees, licences, and submission systems are set by their own publishers.
• Clinical practice guidelines and non-journal content - APTA and its academies also issue clinical practice guidelines, position statements, and practice resources. These are not peer-reviewed journal articles and are usually free on apta.org.

PTJ is a hybrid journal. You can publish under the standard licence at no cost, or pay for an open-access licence. Either way, every PTJ article becomes freely readable 12 months after publication, which is unusual and worth knowing before you decide to pay.

Charges are revised periodically, so confirm the current figure on the Oxford Academic PTJ author pages before you commit. If your funder mandates immediate CC BY, check whether your library's Oxford agreement already covers PTJ.

• Default model: double-anonymized peer review for most article types, so prepare a blinded manuscript file.
• Exceptions: clinical trials, trial protocols, Perspectives, and Points of View are handled under a non-anonymized model, because author and registration details are integral to assessment.
• Turnaround: roughly 20 days to a desk rejection, and around 63 days from submission to a first decision after full review.
• Selectivity: PTJ has reported an acceptance rate near 24%, so a well-matched scope and a clean methods section matter.

1. Check scope and article type. PTJ wants work that speaks to both clinicians and scientists; a purely mechanistic study with no rehabilitation implication is a common desk rejection.
2. Register the study where required. Clinical trials must be prospectively registered, and reporting-guideline checklists (CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE, COSMIN as applicable) are expected.
3. Format in AMA style. PTJ uses AMA numbered references. At first submission any readable format is accepted, but AMA style saves a revision round.
4. Submit through ScholarOne Manuscripts at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ptjournal.
5. Declare your open-access choice. If you want the APTA member discount, enter your membership number at submission rather than after acceptance.

APTA requires authors to grant an exclusive licence to the association on acceptance; under an open-access licence the article is then released as CC BY or CC BY-NC. Preprint deposit is permitted, and accepted manuscripts may be self-archived under Oxford University Press's author self-archiving policy. Expect standard biomedical requirements: IRB or ethics approval statements, informed-consent language, conflict-of-interest and funding disclosures, and trial registration numbers. Corrections and retractions follow conventional biomedical publishing practice, and APTA's editorial office can be reached for permissions and ethics queries.