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Materials Futures

About Materials Futures

Scope

Materials Futures is an international multidisciplinary gold open access journal focusing on publishing original works, perspectives, reviews, articles in all areas of basic and applied materials science and technology. Topic of interests include but are not limited to the following:

Structural Materials: Materials whose mechanical properties, such as elasticity, hardness, and strength etc. are focus of study. Examples include but not limited to:

  • Metals and ceramics.
  • Alloys including high entropy alloys, shape memory alloys etc.
  • Non-crystalline materials and glasses.
  • Composite materials.
  • Materials in the extreme.

Energy Materials: Materials and devices for energy storage and conversion. Examples include but not limited to:

  • Photovoltaic devices & materials, including materials for perovskite, organic, silicon solar cells etc.
  • Artificial photosynthesis materials.
  • Energy harvesting technologies and materials, including nanogenerators etc.
  • Thermoelectric devices and materials.
  • Batteries and supercapacitor materials, including electrode, separator, binder and electrolyte materials.
  • Flow batteries and related electrode & electrolyte materials.
  • Fuel cell technology and related electrode & catalyst materials.
  • Electrolysis related materials.
  • Catalytic materials and processes for energy generation, conversion and storage.

Nanomaterials: Nanoscale materials with novel properties. Examples include but not limited to:

  • Nanocomposites.
  • Granular materials.
  • 2D materials and coatings.
  • Nanomaterial and nanodevice applications, such as in magnetic devices, optics, catalysis, microelectronics, pharmaceutics, and energy technologies.
  • Nanomaterial synthesis, processing, treatment, characterizations, and engineering.

Biomaterials: Bio and bioinspired materials, polymers, colloids, gels etc. Examples include but not limited to:

  • Bioactive materials, including nanomaterials, hydrogels, 2D materials, biopolymers, composites, biohybrids, biomimetics, as well as inorganic materials for biomedical applications.
  • Nanomedical biomaterials, with applications in drug delivery, imaging, theranostics, gene therapy, and immunotherapy, and for therapy of infectious diseases, cancer, metabolic diseases, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as for vaccines and precision medicine.
  • Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine biomaterials, including scaffolds and scaffold-free approaches. For example, for bone, ligament, and muscle tissue engineering, skin regeneration and wound healing, nerve grafts, cardiac patches and tissue vascularization.
  • Bio-fabrication-relative materials, including (bio)inks and technologies, toward generation of functional tissues and organs.

Quantum Materials: Materials and devices where quantum physics plays an essential role in describing their emergent properties. Examples include but not limited to:

  • Exotic correlated materials: Synthesis and characterization of materials like superconductors, topological insulators, Van der Waals magnets, Weyl semimetals, spin-orbit coupling compounds, etc.
  • Materials for photonics and electromechanical devices where quantum physics is clearly demonstrated (spin, quantum confinement, entanglement, quantum statistics, quantum coherence).
  • Condensed matter exhibiting quantum entanglement.
  • Low-dimensional magnetic materials, stripes, ladders and molecular magnets etc.
  • Technologically relevant magnets, including bulk hard and soft magnetic materials, spintronic materials, magnetoelastic/striction, magnetic recording materials, magnetocaloric, multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials.
  • Growth and characterization of heterostructures.
  • Fabrication and characterization of materials and interfaces for quantum technology applications and quantum devices.
  • Materials for qubits.
  • Emergent properties of quantum materials (magnetic monopoles, spin-ice, Skyrmions, vortex lattice etc.)

Information Materials: Materials and devices for information technology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Materials for next-generation, low power and high-speed transistors.
  • Materials for ultra-high density interconnect and advanced packaging fabrication.
  • Materials with unique electrical, optical and magnetic properties.
  • Materials for quantum computing applications.
  • Information device physics and engineering.
  • Smart sensing devices and systems for various applications.
  • Optical and optoelectronic devices.

Materials Theories and Computation: Examples include but not limited to:

  • Materials theory.
  • Materials property prediction.
  • Materials design.
  • Materials genome including high throughput computation.
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in materials science.
  • Materials simulation, including quantum mechanical, atomistic, microstructural, continuum-based simulations.
  • Thermodynamic and phase diagram calculations.
  • Interatomic potentials/force fields.

Why should you publish in Materials Futures?

  • International impact: Published in collaboration with Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Materials Futures provides a truly international reach, extending across all areas of basic and applied materials science and technology.
  • International Editorial Board: Scientific leadership for Materials Futures is led by Editors-in-Chief Professor Weihua Wang, Professor Jinkui Zhao, and Dr. Torsten Brezesinski, who are supported by an Editorial Board of prominent researchers from across the full breadth of materials science.
  • Broad scientific scope: Materials Futures publishes research from across all areas of materials research and technology. It is dedicated to resolving challenges relevant to material synthesis and processing, characterisation, computation, theory, and experimental techniques in areas ranging from metals and ceramics to energy materials, quantum materials and biomaterials.
  • Gold Open Access: Your paper will be published Gold Open Access (OA), providing you and the scientific community with immediate access to articles without the payment of a subscription fee or licence. All the costs of publishing the journal are covered by Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory from 2022 to 2024, and there is no article publication charge (APC) during this period.
  • High standards: Once you submit an article to Materials Futures, it will undergo a thorough and rigorous peer review process. Manuscript will be checked for scientific validity, novelty, quality, and alignment with the journal scope.
  • Fast publication: Materials Futures is committed to providing you with a fast, professional service to ensure rapid first decision, acceptance and publication. Once accepted, your article will be accessible to readers within 24 hours, with a citable DOI.
  • Ease of formatting: You can format your manuscript in any way you choose; the design and typesetting will be undertaken by IOP Publishing as part of the publication process. However, if you would prefer to use a template, please download the Word document and TeX template.

Article types

Materials Futures welcomes submissions of the following article types:

  • Research Papers: Articles of unlimited length reporting new research of outstanding quality that has the potential to make a significant advance in materials science. Authors are invited to prepare a “Future Perspectives” section of at least 200 words.
  • Letters: Reporting urgent and breakthrough work in any aspect of materials science. Letters should be around 6 pages in length (up to 5000 words). A justification statement in the cover letter is required along with the submission. Authors are invited to prepare a “Future Perspectives” section of at least 200 words.
  • Topical Reviews: Review articles that provide a snapshot of recent progress made in a particular field relevant to materials science. The typical length of a Topical Review is 10-15 pages (10 000–15 000 words), with around 600 words for the “Future Perspectives” section.
  • Perspectives: Highlighting the impact and wider implications of new research conducted in the field of materials science (especially if the topic is too technical for a Commentary or too narrow for a Review). Perspective articles can be speculative and advocate a controversial position. Word count: up to 5000; references: up to 80; typically by invitation only.
  • Commentary: Focusing on scientific, commercial, ethical, legal or social issues in the field of materials science.
  • News/Highlights: Brief summaries of papers of exceptional significance.

Special requirements

  • Video Abstracts
    We invite all authors to submit a video abstract with their paper. This does not need to be sent in with the article when first submitted but we must receive this within three weeks of acceptance to avoid delaying publication of the article. More information on video abstracts can be found on our Publishing Support website.
  • Future Perspectives
    Every manuscript is required to include a “Future Perspectives” section with around 600 words for review paper and 200 words for original research. This section should be used for forward-looking perspectives on materials development in relevant research areas, the author’s view on where this field is going, where the challenges and breakthroughs might be etc. Authors are invited to be speculative, based on the insights garnered from the main body of the manuscript.
  • Supplementary Material
    The electronic version of Materials Futures can include extra material as multimedia attachments. Any electronically stored material can be attached, so you can share full resources with the other physics teachers and include exciting illustrations with submissions. Unfortunately, we no longer allow the use of any music at all in supplementary material.

Peer review

All research papers and reviews to be published by Materials Futures will be rigorously peer reviewed.

Materials Futures uses the single-blind peer review process in which reviewers know the identity of the authors, but authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.

More information about the peer review process can be found on our Peer review policy page.

Ethics

Materials Futures maintains the highest standards of publication and research ethics and is a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors are expected to comply with IOP Publishing’s Ethical Policy.

Research data

Materials Futures has adopted IOP Publishing’s standard data policy. Please check that your article complies with the policy before submission.

For any questions about the policy please contact the journal.

Many research funders now require authors to make all data related to their research available in an online repository. Please refer to the policy for further information about research data, data repositories and data citation.

Open access

Materials Futures is a fully open access journal. Articles are published under a CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) licence. Articles are freely available to everyone to read and reuse immediately upon publication, provided attribution to the author is given. Publication is funded by Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory and no charges are required from the authors.

For more information on IOP Publishing’s open access policies please see our Open access page.

Publication charges

This is an open access journal with no subscription fees for readers or libraries. As part of our commitment to open science, Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory is currently paying all article publication charges so there are no author fees to publish in the journal.

Authors publishing in Materials Futures retain copyright in their article and publish it under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. We work with our authors to make sure that they understand their rights and responsibilities when they publish in Materials Futures. Information about the licence terms in place for Materials Futures can be found here.

Abstracting and indexing services

We work with our authors to help make their work as easy to discover as possible. Materials Futures is currently included in the following abstracting and discovery services:

  • DOAJ
  • Ei Compendex
  • ESCI
  • Inspec
  • MyScienceWork
  • Scilit
  • Scite
  • Scopus
  • Wanfang Data
  • x-mol
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