About High-speed Railway

High-speed Railway

Overview and identity

High-speed Railway is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open-access English-language journal published by Beijing Jiaotong University in Beijing, China. It was launched in 2023 to provide scientists and engineers working on high-speed rail with a dedicated international platform for novel and original findings. The journal appears quarterly, with publishing services provided by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd., and its articles are hosted on ScienceDirect as well as on the SciOpen platform of Tsinghua University Press. It carries the print ISSN 2097-3446, the electronic ISSN 2949-8678 and the Chinese domestic serial number CN 10-1922/U2. Its supervising authority is China's Ministry of Education, through the university. The journal's stated aims are to promote transnational academic exchange and cooperation and to enhance the global influence of China's high-speed railway industry and the development of its technologies. In a field long served by general transport and civil-engineering journals, High-speed Railway was created as the specialist title for a technology in which China operates the world's most extensive network.

Origins and the Excellence Action Plan

The journal was created under the "High-Starting-Point New Journals" subprogram of the Excellence Action Plan for Chinese scientific journals, an initiative that seeks to establish high-level English-language journals through forward-looking planning rather than by converting existing Chinese titles. A 2026 article in the journal reviewing its own establishment and development describes how Beijing Jiaotong University launched High-speed Railway, abbreviated HSPR, in 2023 as an open-access English-language journal in the high-speed railway field, and how the university established a Beijing Jiaotong University Journal Center at the end of 2025 to support its journal portfolio. The first papers appeared online in June 2023, announced by KeAi Publishing. The featured articles in that first issue signalled the journal's breadth from the outset: a study of technology development trends for high-speed electric multiple units, a review of wireless channel estimation for high-speed rail communications, and work on millimetre-wave extra-large-scale MIMO active user detection and channel estimation for high-speed railway communications. A special issue marking the journal's third anniversary in 2026 also coincides with Beijing Jiaotong University's 130th anniversary.

Beijing Jiaotong University, the publishing institution

The journal's owner and host, Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), is one of China's most historically railway-focused universities. Its history traces to 1896 and to the Beijing Railway Management Institute, described as China's first higher-education institution committed to fostering railway management talent and the birthplace of modern China's railway management and telecommunications education. In 1921 the Beijing school merged with institutions in Shanghai and Tangshan to form Jiaotong University, and after reorganisation in 1923 the Beijing campus took the name Beijing Jiaotong University. In 1950 it was named Northern Jiaotong University, with the renowned bridge expert Mao Yisheng as president; it later became the Beijing Railway Institute before the Beijing Jiaotong University name was restored in 2003. The university is a national key university administered directly by the Ministry of Education and jointly supported by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Transport, the Beijing municipal government and China State Railway Group. Its faculty and students have participated in milestones from the Qinghai-Tibet Railway to the building of high-speed railways and modern urban rail transit across China. The journal's editorial office address is given as No. 3 Shangyuancun, Haidian District, Beijing 100044.

Scope: planning, design and systems

The journal organises its scope into five broad areas. The first covers high-speed railway planning and design, including network planning, electrification and automation technology, communication and signalling, and vehicle design theory. This is the territory of line selection, system architecture and the design choices made before construction begins. The journal's interdisciplinary framing is deliberate: a high-speed line is simultaneously a civil work, an electrical system, a communications network and a transport service, and the journal invites work that treats those layers together as well as work on each layer in depth. Papers on communication and signalling, such as the first issue's studies of wireless channels and massive MIMO for rail, sit alongside planning research because the reliability of train control depends on both.

Scope: infrastructure and civil engineering

The second scope area is high-speed railway infrastructure: civil-engineering technology, railway infrastructure itself, roads, bridges, tunnels, underground works, and subgrade and pavement performance and maintenance. High-speed operation places unusual demands on infrastructure, because track geometry must be maintained to tight tolerances at speeds of 200 to 350 kilometres per hour, and because bridges, tunnels and earthworks must perform for decades under intensive use. Research published in this area addresses how such structures are designed, built, inspected and maintained. The third scope area, equipment and systems, covers rolling stock and its manufacture, rail itself, the vehicle-track coupling system that governs ride quality, safety and wear, superconducting magnetic levitation technology, and railway engineering more broadly. Vehicle-track coupling is a signature research strength of Chinese railway science, and its explicit naming in the scope signals the journal's roots in that research community.

Scope: operation, management, safety and sustainability

The fourth area covers high-speed railway operation and management: railway policy, track management, information management, train dispatching, and train operation and control. A 2024 article in the journal on artificial-intelligence-powered safety and efficiency improvement for train control illustrates this strand, examining how a multi-mode integrated railway system anchored by high-speed rail serves diverse travel needs and how intelligent control can improve both safety and capacity. The fifth area is deliberately open, covering related topics such as high-speed railway safety, environmental protection and sustainable development. Taken together, the five areas span the full life of a high-speed railway, from the decision to build a line, through its engineering and equipment, to its daily operation and its long-term environmental footprint, which is why the journal describes itself as interdisciplinary rather than as a civil-engineering or electrical-engineering title.

Editorial leadership and peer review

Peer review for the journal is conducted under the responsibility of Beijing Jiaotong University. The SciOpen journal listing names Chunfang Lu as editor-in-chief. The university retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues, while authors of individual articles retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights, with KeAi Communications and Beijing Jiaotong University granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights. Articles are published under open-access licences, recorded on published papers as the CC BY-NC-ND licence, making each article immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute. The journal's publishing-services arrangement with Elsevier places its full text on ScienceDirect, the same platform that carries KeAi's wider portfolio of China-based English-language journals, giving High-speed Railway distribution through a channel already used by research libraries worldwide.

Open access and publication charges

High-speed Railway is fully open access. To support that model it charges an article processing charge of USD 1,000 plus taxes, payable by authors or on their behalf by a research funder or institution; for all papers submitted before 31 December 2025 the charge was waived, making submission free during the journal's establishment phase — a common launch strategy for new journals building an author base. The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which records that it began publishing in open access in 2023, that its publisher of record is KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. in China with Beijing Jiaotong University as the associated organisation, that manuscripts are accepted in English, and that its subject classification falls under transportation engineering within civil engineering. DOAJ listing requires journals to meet transparency criteria on peer review, licensing and charges, so its presence there is part of the journal's public quality record.

Indexing and recognition

The journal's most significant recognition to date is its selection for the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in the Web of Science Core Collection. KeAi announced that articles published from 2023 onward, beginning with volume 1, issue 1, would be included in ESCI. ESCI coverage gives the journal's articles visibility in Web of Science searches and a pathway toward fuller citation indexing, and for a journal launched only in 2023 it represents an early external validation of its editorial and publishing standards. The journal has also used its own pages to reflect on journal-building itself: the 2026 article on strategies for establishing and developing an international journal in the high-speed railway field reviews the innovative international development practices promoted under the High-Starting-Point New Journals initiative, making High-speed Railway a documented case study in how China is building new English-language journals in fields of national technological strength.

Readership and significance

High-speed Railway serves researchers, engineers and planners working on the fastest-growing mode of intercity transport in China and an expanding one worldwide. Its readers include rolling-stock and signalling engineers, civil engineers specialising in bridges, tunnels and subgrade, operations researchers working on dispatching and control, and policy specialists studying how high-speed networks are planned and financed. For readers outside China, the journal offers a window, in English and free to read, into the research community behind the world's largest high-speed rail programme, published by the university that has trained Chinese railway specialists since the nineteenth century. For Chinese researchers, it offers an international, indexed, open-access venue owned by a domestic institution. Three years after launch, with quarterly volumes, ESCI indexing and a third-anniversary special issue, the journal has established itself as the dedicated scholarly record of high-speed railway science.