About Bioactive Materials

Bioactive Materials

Bioactive Materials is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access research journal based in Beijing, China. It was launched in 2016 and is published by KeAi, with publishing services by Elsevier, in association with the Chinese Society for Biomaterials. It was China's first journal dedicated to bioactive materials — materials specifically designed to elicit appropriate biological responses when they come into contact with cells, tissues or organs. The journal publishes research papers, reviews and rapid communications on the science and engineering of next-generation biomaterials, from bioactive metals, ceramics and polymers to materials sourced from nature and bioactive composites. Its ISSN is 2452-199X. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, in Scopus and in PubMed Central, and under its founding editor-in-chief, Yufeng Zheng of Peking University, it developed rapidly from a 2016 start-up title into a leading international journal in biomaterials science.

Launched in 2016 as a first for China

The journal was launched in 2016 — its first volume is the 2016 volume — as, in the seed description for this profile, China's first journal dedicated to bioactive materials. KeAi's own account of the journal's early history says that Bioactive Materials was launched in 2016 and, under the leadership of founding Editor-in-Chief Yufeng Zheng of Peking University, rapidly developed into a reputable international open-access journal. The publisher's address recorded in the Web of Science Master Journal List is in Beijing: KeAi Publishing Ltd, Dongcheng District, Beijing — consistent with the journal's listing in this directory as a Beijing outlet.

The timing was deliberate. Biomaterials research in China had grown into a large, internationally active community by the 2010s, but researchers publishing on materials designed to interact with living tissue had no China-based, English-language journal devoted exclusively to that subject. A dedicated title gave that community a home journal with an international publisher's platform, an international editorial structure, and open-access distribution — and gave readers elsewhere a single place to follow Chinese and international work on bioactive materials together.

The society and the publisher behind it

Bioactive Materials is published in association with the Chinese Society for Biomaterials. The society connection is visible in the journal's activities: its special collections have included one marking the 20th anniversary of the research collaboration between the Chinese Society for Biomaterials and its international partners, and the journal's lifetime achievement award ceremony in January 2026 was held during the society's academic annual meeting. Yufeng Zheng himself serves as a vice-president of the Chinese Society for Biomaterials, as well as co-editor-in-chief of the journal, linking the society, the journal and the Peking University research community closely together.

Publishing is handled by KeAi Communications Co. Ltd — the copyright holder named on the journal's ScienceDirect pages — with publishing services by Elsevier B.V. KeAi is the Beijing-based open-access publishing venture whose journals are distributed on Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform. That arrangement gives a Beijing society journal the production, hosting and discovery infrastructure of one of the world's largest scientific publishers, while editorial ownership and identity remain with the Chinese journal and its society.

What 'bioactive' means in the journal's scope

The journal's aims and scope define its subject carefully. It welcomes research papers, reviews and rapid communications concerned with the science and engineering of next-generation biomaterials that come into contact with cells, tissues or organs across all living species. Bioactive materials, in this framing, will feature adaptiveness to the biological environment, being designed to stimulate and/or direct appropriate cellular and tissue responses, or to control interactions with microbiological species.

That definition separates the journal's territory from biomaterials in general. A material that merely sits inertly in the body is a biomaterial; a material engineered so that its surface, chemistry or degradation behaviour actively prompts bone to grow onto it, tissue to regenerate around it, a drug to be released from it, or bacteria to be resisted by it, is a bioactive material in the journal's sense. The research question the journal exists to publish is not simply whether a material is compatible with biology, but whether it has been designed — functionally and deliberately — to do something biological.

Five families of materials

The journal organises its coverage around five categories of bioactive materials, set out in its aims and scope: (i) bioactive metals and alloys; (ii) bioactive inorganics — ceramics, glasses and carbon-based materials; (iii) bioactive polymers and gels; (iv) bioactive materials sourced from nature; and (v) bioactive composites, for use in human or veterinary medicine as implants and related applications.

It also publishes research on the entire range of bioactive materials that have been specifically and functionally engineered or designed in terms of their physical form — particulate, fibre and other forms — their topology, such as porosity and surface roughness, or their dimensions, from macro to nano scales. That attention to form and topology matters scientifically: in bioactive materials, a pore structure that invites blood vessels to grow in, or a surface roughness that encourages cells to attach, can be as important as the underlying chemistry. A journal that treats design at every scale — composition, form, surface and size — as part of its remit covers the field as its researchers actually practise it.

Tissue engineering, regeneration and drug delivery

The applications named in the seed for this profile — tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug delivery and implant surfaces — map directly onto the journal's published scope. Tissue engineering research asks how scaffolds and constructs can support cells in rebuilding damaged tissue. Regenerative medicine extends that question to materials that prompt the body's own repair processes. Drug delivery work covers materials engineered to carry and release therapeutic agents in controlled ways, in contact with tissues and organs. Implant-surface research examines how the interface between a device and living tissue determines whether an implant integrates, is rejected, becomes infected or fails.

Because the journal's scope covers materials in contact with cells, tissues or organs across all living species, and names veterinary as well as human medicine, its remit is broader than a purely clinical journal. It is a materials-science journal whose test of significance is a biological response — a combination that serves materials scientists, biomedical engineers, clinicians and veterinary researchers in the same pages.

Yufeng Zheng and the editorial leadership

The journal's founding editor-in-chief is Yufeng Zheng of Peking University in Beijing. Zheng received his PhD in materials science from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1998 and has been a full professor at Peking University since 2004. His own research specialism is new metallic biomaterials and their medical devices, and Elsevier's profile of him records more than 700 peer-reviewed articles and election to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows in 2019 and as a Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering in 2020. KeAi describes him as the journal's founding editor-in-chief under whose leadership it developed rapidly; more recent Elsevier material describes him as co-editor-in-chief.

A founding editor whose own field — metallic biomaterials — is the first of the journal's five material families gave the new title immediate credibility with the community it needed to attract. The journal has since built an international editorial board and reviewer community, acknowledged in KeAi's reporting of its activities and awards.

Indexing and recognition

Bioactive Materials was accepted for inclusion in Scopus, as KeAi announced, describing it at the time as the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. It was subsequently selected for coverage in the Science Citation Index Expanded, part of the Web of Science Core Collection; the Master Journal List records the journal with ISSN/eISSN 2452-199X, in SCIE, with additional coverage in Current Contents Life Sciences and Essential Science Indicators. The seed for this profile also records indexing in PubMed Central, the open archive through which its biomedical articles are freely available to clinical and life-science readers.

In 2021 KeAi established the Bioactive Materials Lifetime Achievement Award, to honour scholars who have made extraordinary scientific contributions to the field of bioactive materials. In January 2026 the award was conferred on Professor Robert S. Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described by KeAi as one of only nine Institute Professors at MIT, in recognition of his pioneering contributions and profound influence on the discipline; the ceremony was held during the 2nd Beijing-Hong Kong Bio-Composites Forum and the 2026 Academic Annual Meeting of the Chinese Society for Biomaterials at the University of Hong Kong. A journal that, within a decade of launch, is presenting its lifetime achievement award to one of the founders of modern biomaterials and drug-delivery science is signalling — and exercising — convening power in its field.

Open access on ScienceDirect

The journal is fully open access: its articles are freely available to read on ScienceDirect. Its current article publishing charge is listed by the publisher as USD 2,200, excluding taxes — the fee that supports the open-access model for authors whose work is accepted. Publication has grown substantially since the single first volume of 2016: the journal's issue listing shows multiple volumes per year in recent years, reaching volumes in the fifties and sixties in the 2026 listing. That growth in output, alongside its indexing milestones, charts the trajectory KeAi describes as the journal's rapid development from a 2016 launch into an established international title.

Special issues and article collections are part of its publishing programme, including society anniversary collections and topical collections in areas such as ocular drug delivery using bioactive nanocoatings — an example of how a materials journal's drug-delivery scope extends into specialised clinical territories.

Who should read it

The core readership is the biomaterials community: materials scientists designing metals, ceramics, glasses, polymers, gels and composites for biological use; biomedical engineers working on implants, scaffolds and delivery systems; and researchers in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine measuring whether a material produces the response it was designed to produce. Clinicians and veterinary researchers interested in implant surfaces, infection control and repair provide a second readership, and the journal's PubMed Central presence makes its work discoverable to life-science readers who may never browse a materials journal's table of contents.

For readers of this directory, the journal also illustrates a publishing model: a Chinese learned society, a Beijing open-access publisher, and a global publisher's platform combined in a single title, launched to serve a field in which China had research strength but no dedicated English-language journal of its own.

Place in this directory

Bioactive Materials is listed here as a magazine and journal outlet from Beijing, China. Launched in 2016 as China's first journal dedicated to bioactive materials, published by KeAi with Elsevier publishing services in association with the Chinese Society for Biomaterials, founded under Yufeng Zheng of Peking University, and indexed in SCI-Expanded, Scopus and PubMed Central, it covers the design of materials made to elicit biological responses — tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug delivery and implant surfaces among them. Within the China magazines batch, it is the specialist biomedical-materials title: narrower in subject than a general materials journal, and distinctive for having been created, from its first volume, around a single scientific idea — that a material's value can lie in the biological response it is designed to provoke.