About The Journal

● Scope

● Article types

● Special requirements

● Frequency

● Peer review

● Ethics

● Research data

● Open access

● Copyright

● Abstracting and indexing services

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.

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 (10000-15000 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.
●Roadmaps: Composed by leading scientists or a team of researchers and providing a broad overview on the status and current/future challenges of emerging technologies across a given subject area.

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.

Frequency

Materials Futures publishes four issues per year.

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

This journal has adopted IOP Publishing's standard data policy. Please check that your article complies with the policy before submission.

Questions about the policy should be sent to editorialoffice@materialsfutures.org

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.

Copyright

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: