About Advanced Photonics

Advanced Photonics

Advanced Photonics is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal of optics and photonics, co-published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Chinese Laser Press (CLP) of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Launched with its first issue in January 2019 and based editorially in Shanghai, it was created as a highly selective international journal for innovative fundamental and applied research in optics, photonics and related fields. In a field with many established titles, Advanced Photonics was deliberately positioned at the breakthrough end: top-quality original papers, letters and review articles reflecting significant advances, together with news, commentaries and interviews that give the journal a magazine-like front section alongside its research content.

Overview and identity

The journal is published bimonthly — six issues a year — and is open access, with articles published under a CC BY licence. It carries ISSN 2577-5421 and the ISO 4 abbreviation Adv. Photonics. Articles appear in the SPIE Digital Library, SPIE's large collection of optics and photonics research, and also on Chinese Laser Press's China Optical Journal Network, giving the same paper a native home in both the international society-publishing system and China's own optics publishing platform. That dual presence is the journal's identity in miniature. One publisher, SPIE, is an international professional society headquartered in the United States; the other, Chinese Laser Press, is the publishing arm built by one of China's principal optics institutes in Shanghai together with the Chinese Optical Society. Advanced Photonics is where those two systems meet, and it was announced from the start as a partnership product rather than as a Chinese journal with foreign distribution or an American journal with Chinese contributors.

Creation, announcement and first issue

SPIE and Chinese Laser Press announced the journal in 2018, opening manuscript submissions in spring 2018 and publishing the first articles online from late 2018 ahead of Volume 1, Issue 1 in January 2019. The announcement framed the new title as a response to growing demand within the photonics community to publish and share significant, innovative research results as rapidly, accurately and accessibly as possible. Article publication charges were waived in the journal's first year to encourage early submissions. The inaugural issue then demonstrated the intended mix in practice. Its research articles covered light-sheet microscopy for imaging large biomedical specimens, deep learning for digital holography, real-time spectroscopy for the design and optimisation of ultrafast fibre lasers, a new approach to creating high-Q cavities for trapping light, a pinhole-array-mask diffractive imaging method, and the size and energy-efficiency challenges of semiconductor nanolasers. Alongside the research, the issue carried an interview with Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London on transformation optics and metamaterials, a review article on transformation optics from macroscopic to nanoscale regimes, and a perspective on the future of photonics by Eugene Arthurs, a former SPIE chief executive. A first issue that pairs nanolaser research with an interview with one of the founders of metamaterials research is a statement of editorial intent: this journal intends to publish the field's future and talk to the people who made its past, in the same pages.

The two publishers: SPIE and Chinese Laser Press

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organisation founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering and technology; its digital library is described by the society as the world's largest collection of optics and photonics applied research. Chinese Laser Press, the Shanghai partner, was established by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and the Chinese Optical Society in 2009 to promote the development of optics and photonics in research institutions and industry. At the time Advanced Photonics launched, CLP published seven journals besides the new title, including three in English — Photonics Research, High Power Laser Science and Engineering and Chinese Optics Letters — plus a magazine, and it managed the opticsjournal.net platform, described as the most active online platform in optics in China, while also holding conferences and offering continuing-education courses. The partnership therefore joined complementary assets: SPIE contributed an international society, its digital library and a global reviewer and reader community; CLP contributed a leading Chinese optics institute, a proven English-language journal stable and China's most active optics platform.

Scope: the research areas the journal covers

The launch announcement listed the journal's research areas in full, and the list remains the clearest map of its scope. Advanced Photonics covers photonic devices and systems for communications; photonics for clean energy; photonics in chemistry, biology and medicine; optical imaging, metrology and sensors; photonics for data storage, data manipulation and displays; materials, artificial materials and nanostructures for photonics; photonics in quantum technologies; nonlinear and ultrafast optics; optoelectronics and optical information processing; and optical manipulation techniques, optomechanics and optofluidics. Within that map, the journal looks for three kinds of contribution: new concepts in fundamental research with great impact and significance; state-of-the-art technologies in the form of novel methods for important applications; and reviews of recent major advances and state-of-the-art benchmarking. The scope is therefore broad in topic but narrow in threshold — a paper on quantum photonics, biophotonics or metasurfaces belongs by subject, but only if it represents a significant advance or breakthrough in theoretical or experimental research, or a promising novel application.

Article types and editorial selectivity

The journal publishes top-quality original papers, letters and review articles, together with news and commentaries covering scientific and technological discoveries, breakthroughs and achievements. Both publishers described it at launch as highly selective, and its editors stated their aim in unusually personal terms in the first issue: to make Advanced Photonics a trusted source of groundbreaking research in optics and optical technologies, incorporating a personal approach to science — the interview format being the clearest example — to make an exciting mixture of scientific and general material for readers. That mixture matters for how the journal is used. A research group reads it for letters and papers on nanophotonics, imaging and quantum research; a broader professional reader can enter through a perspective or interview and arrive at the research from the field's own narrative. The journal has also acted as a convening brand for its community: in January 2021 SPIE and CLP hosted an Advanced Photonics colloquium, a free online event of six interactive sessions moderated by the journal's associate editors covering nanophotonics, imaging, quantum research and metalenses, with speakers from universities across several continents.

Editors-in-chief: Yuan and Zayats

The journal's editors-in-chief are Xiao-Cong Yuan and Anatoly Zayats. Yuan — Larry Yuan — is a Changjiang Scholar Professor and director of the Nanophotonics Research Center at Shenzhen University in China. Zayats is based at King's College London in the United Kingdom. The pairing mirrors the publishing partnership: one editor rooted in China's photonics research system, one in a European university, both working in nanophotonics, the sub-field concerned with light at the scale of nanostructures and artificial materials. Their joint editorship was in place from the announcement of the journal, and they wrote the editorial framing the first issue. For authors, the structure signals that a submission from Shanghai, Shenzhen, London or anywhere else is handled within the same editorial office and judged, in the publishers' phrase, as innovative fundamental or applied research — not as a national contribution to a national journal. The colloquium role of the journal's associate editors, moderating its international online sessions, likewise reflects an editorial board used as an active scientific network rather than a masthead formality.

Open access and publication platforms

Every article in Advanced Photonics is open access under CC BY, free for any reader to read, share and reuse with attribution. SPIE publishes the journal in the SPIE Digital Library, with articles posted as they are reviewed, accepted, copyedited and typeset rather than held for a single issue release date, and the journal is simultaneously available on Chinese Laser Press's China Optical Journal Network — the researching and opticsjournal platforms through which CLP serves the Chinese optics community. Dual-platform open access is more than a technical detail. It means a paper is discoverable by the international community that searches the SPIE Digital Library and by the Chinese research community that works through CLP's platform, without a paywall on either side, and it reflects the co-publishers' shared interest: SPIE in serving a global membership, CLP in raising the international visibility of a Shanghai-based journal programme. The waiver of the article publication charge in the first year, announced at launch, was the founding version of the same accessibility principle on the author side.

Frequency, identifiers and publication record

Advanced Photonics has been published continuously from 2019 to the present as a bimonthly journal. Its bibliographic identifiers are ISSN 2577-5421, CODEN APDHC9 and Library of Congress control number 2018201563, the last of which dates from its pre-publication registration in 2018, when submissions opened. Volume numbering runs from Volume 1 in 2019, and articles are cited by volume, issue and article number in the SPIE Digital Library style, as in the first volume's Editor-in-Chief Choice Award papers announced by Chinese Laser Press for 2019 — among them work on bound states in the continuum and Fano resonances in the strong mode-coupling regime, published as volume 1, issue 1, article 016001 (2019). That an award list existed for the journal's very first year, assessed on quality, downloads, citations and importance to the field, shows how quickly the title was operating as a normal, competitive journal rather than a launch project.

Indexing and citation standing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, as recorded in its founding description, and its indexing record also includes Current Contents/Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ei Compendex, Inspec and ProQuest databases. Coverage across both Web of Science and Scopus, together with the engineering indexes Ei Compendex and Inspec, places its articles in the discovery systems used by physicists, electrical engineers and materials researchers alike — appropriate for a journal whose scope crosses those communities. Its Journal Citation Reports impact factor, recorded as 19.5 for 2025, places a journal founded only in 2019 in the highest citation tier of optics publishing. Such a figure should be understood in the context of the journal's model: selectivity, review articles and breakthrough papers in fast-moving areas such as metasurfaces and quantum photonics naturally generate high citation rates, and the impact factor is the arithmetic consequence of that editorial strategy rather than a separate achievement.

A flagship for Shanghai photonics — and the family it created

The success of Advanced Photonics turned it into a parent title. SPIE and CLP subsequently launched Advanced Photonics Nexus, a gold open-access sibling journal whose inaugural issue appeared in the second half of 2022, publishing novel results of high significance and broad interest across optics and photonics with fast-track publication, and edited by Yuan and Zayats together with Weibiao Chen of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics; the two organisations also launched Photonics Insights, an invite-only diamond open-access review journal. A partnership that began with one journal in 2019 had become a small publishing family within a few years. For Shanghai, the significance is institutional: the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, through Chinese Laser Press, is co-publisher of a journal that competes internationally for the best photonics papers, edited partly from China and read everywhere without a paywall. For the wider field, Advanced Photonics stands as a working model of East–West society co-publishing — SPIE's global platform and CLP's Chinese base producing a single selective title, rather than parallel national editions of photonics research.