About Advanced Scientific Instruments

Advanced Scientific Instruments

Advanced Scientific Instruments (ASI) is an open-access, peer-reviewed international journal providing an interdisciplinary platform for research on instruments, instrumentation and measurement science. Published jointly by Science China Press and KeAi Communications under the supervision of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it debuted with its inaugural issue online in the spring of 2026. The journal is hosted on ScienceDirect, with publishing services by Elsevier on behalf of Science China Press and KeAi, and copyright held by Science China Press. Its articles carry DOIs in the 10.1016/j.asi series. The journal states its purpose plainly: to publish innovative solutions for the development and use of scientific instruments and equipment to measure, monitor and record physical phenomena, in order to advance measurement science, methods, functionality and applications.

Why a journal for instruments

Scientific instruments are the enabling layer of experimental science: every advance in what can be measured — smaller, faster, more sensitive, more precise — opens phenomena to study that were previously invisible. Yet instrument research is scattered across the journals of the disciplines that use the instruments, so a physicist building a detector, a chemist improving a spectrometer and an engineer designing a sensor may never read each other's work. Advanced Scientific Instruments was launched to answer that fragmentation. Reporting on its debut described it as aiming to become the definitive global platform dedicated to cutting-edge research in modern instrumentation, committing to rigorously peer-reviewed, open-access research that drives forward the core principles of scientific measurement, sensor technology and instrumental innovation. Its sponsorship under the supervision of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and its joint publication by Science China Press and KeAi, place that ambition inside China's national science publishing system while addressing an international authorship.

Section A: development of scientific instruments

The journal is organised into six sections, and the first is its foundation. Section A, on the development of scientific instruments, focuses on innovative design, methods, metrological characterisation and theory across all aspects of advanced instruments. Its listed contents include detectors, sensors, transducers, signal generators and virtual instruments, among much else. This is the section for papers whose contribution is the instrument itself: a new detector architecture, a better-characterised transducer, a design method that can be reused across applications. Metrological characterisation — the rigorous measurement of an instrument's own performance — is named explicitly, reflecting the journal's measurement-science identity: a claim about a new instrument is only as good as the evidence for its accuracy, sensitivity, stability and limits, and Section A is where that evidence is expected to be presented and judged.

Section B: photonics, laser and radar

Section B covers photonics, laser and radar. It focuses on new equipment and techniques for photon manipulation and detection across all photon energies, on lasers — including pump-probe and resonance ionisation lasers — on radar, radiometry, spectroscopy of all types, and on optical metrology and inspection. Light-based measurement is one of the largest families in modern instrumentation, spanning laboratory spectroscopy, remote sensing, communications and industrial inspection, and the section's breadth reflects that: the common thread is not an application area but a physical carrier, the photon, and the instruments that generate, shape, transmit and detect it. Papers in this section can therefore range from a new laser source to a radiometric method to an optical inspection system, unified by the journal's expectation that the instrumental advance itself is characterised and explained.

Section C: imaging and microscopy

Section C covers imaging and microscopy. It focuses on new advances and breakthroughs in the theory and experimental analysis methods, techniques and equipment of micro- and nano-metrology, surface physics, materials characterisation and precision measurement, together with real-time image analysis and synthesis systems and visualisation. The journal's own early content shows the section in action: its 2026 articles include a review on multidimensional phonon imaging and sub-nanoscale thermometry drawing on advances in sub-5 meV STEM-EELS — scanning transmission electron microscopy with electron energy-loss spectroscopy — an example of imaging at the boundary of what current instruments can resolve, in both space and energy. Imaging papers are among the most demanding in instrumentation because the instrument, the reconstruction or analysis method and the scientific result are inseparable; Section C gives that combined work a dedicated home rather than splitting it between microscopy journals and applications journals.

Sections D and E: electronics, sensing and measurement

Section D covers electronics, micro- and nano-technology and systems: the advanced theory, analytical methods, experiments and applications of instruments in micro- and optoelectronics and optical information technologies, microcomputer design and chip-based processes. Section E covers sensing, measurement and manipulation, and its listed contents are the widest in the journal: intelligent instruments for automation, quantum sensing and instruments, sensors and actuators, uncertainty, traceability and calibration, instrument control, and analytical techniques including chromatography, electrochemistry, electrophoresis, relaxation methods, thermal analysis, physical property measurements and membrane technology. Two features deserve emphasis. First, quantum sensing — using quantum effects to measure with precision beyond classical limits — is named as a core topic, marking the journal's interest in the newest measurement frontier. Second, uncertainty, traceability and calibration are named alongside the glamorous topics: the unglamorous metrological chain that makes measurements comparable between laboratories is treated as first-class subject matter.

Section F: data analysis tools and approaches

Section F, the final section, covers data analysis tools and approaches: new data acquisition architectures and components, pre-processing techniques, machine learning and signal processing, and artificial intelligence methods and systems. Its inclusion completes the journal's model of a modern instrument. A contemporary instrument is not only optics, mechanics and electronics; it is also the acquisition pipeline that captures its signals and the algorithms that turn raw signals into measurements. By giving data architectures, signal processing and AI methods their own section, the journal recognises that many instrumental advances now arrive as software and computation — a better estimator, a learned reconstruction, a smarter acquisition scheme — and that those advances deserve the same peer-reviewed scrutiny as hardware. For authors, the six-section structure also acts as a map for submission: a paper is placed by the layer of the instrument stack it advances, from physical principle to data product.

Publishing model, peer review and access

Advanced Scientific Instruments is fully open access: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Its guide for authors states that the journal follows a single anonymised review process, in which submissions are first assessed by the editors for suitability before peer review. Like other KeAi journals, submissions are screened automatically using iThenticate's CrossCheck within the editorial system to detect plagiarism and overlapping text, and authors are encouraged to provide ORCID identifiers. Open access for KeAi titles is normally funded by an article publishing charge paid by authors, funders or institutions. The journal is a peer-reviewed, full open-access title whose owner, Science China Press, retains copyright of the compiled journal and issues, while publishing services are provided by Elsevier on behalf of Science China Press and KeAi — the standard KeAi arrangement under which the owning institution keeps editorial control and the publisher provides platform, production and global dissemination.

Publisher and institutional backing

The journal's backers give it unusual weight for a new title. Science China Press is the publishing house associated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the journal is published under the Academy's supervision. KeAi Communications, its co-publisher, is a Beijing-based joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier; repurposed as an open-access publishing service provider in 2013, it has built a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals and provides ScienceDirect hosting, Editorial Manager submission handling, analytics and production. Launch coverage in spring 2026 reported the inaugural issue appearing online with articles already assigned 2026 DOIs in the j.asi series, including article 100009 cited in the debut announcement. A dedicated instruments journal backed by a national academy, a national science press and Elsevier's platform starts with distribution and credibility that most new journals take years to build; its remaining task is the editorial one of making its six sections the place instrument researchers across disciplines actually look first.