About Cell Regeneration

Cell Regeneration

Cell Regeneration is an open-access academic journal covering stem cell biology, regeneration and regenerative medicine, published by Springer, through SpringerOpen and BioMed Central, in association with the Chinese Society for Cell Biology. Its electronic ISSN is 2045-9769, and copyright in the journal rests with the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, of which it is the official journal. The journal's stated aim is to provide a worldwide platform for research on stem cells and regenerative biology, to develop the basic science of the field, and to foster its clinical translation in medicine. It welcomes reports of novel discoveries, theories, methods, technologies and products in stem cell and regenerative research, from laboratories in China and internationally.

The journal has had an eventful publishing history that explains its present form. It was founded in 2012 by the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was relaunched by the Chinese Society for Cell Biology in 2019 with a reorganised editorial board and a reoriented scope, and since 2020 has been co-published by the Society and Springer. The directory listing for this profile places the journal in Beijing, the seat of the Society, and records it as indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, PubMed Central and Scopus.

Founding in Guangzhou in 2012

Cell Regeneration was founded in 2012, with its first issue published that June. Its founding editor-in-chief was Duanqing Pei, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, and the founding institute supported the journal, covering the cost of publication on behalf of authors. Pei's launch editorial, "Cell regeneration — bridging discoveries in applied and basic research," set out the journal's founding character: it would devote itself to publishing discoveries in cell biology and regeneration from both basic and applied research, would be deliberately "pro-discovery," and would make the publication process as efficient as possible, working with an international editorial board.

The first issue embodied that brief, presenting novel approaches to growing cells in vitro alongside ideas that might eventually help regenerate cells or tissues in vivo. The Guangzhou home mattered scientifically as well as institutionally: the institute's Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology and its stem cell research groups were among the journal's early contributors, and the journal grew up alongside one of China's principal centres for pluripotent stem cell research.

Relaunch under the Chinese Society for Cell Biology

In 2019 the journal was relaunched by the Chinese Society for Cell Biology as the Society's official journal. The relaunch involved major changes, described by the Society as a reorganisation of the editorial board and a reorientation of the journal with new scopes. In 2020 the Society and Springer began co-publishing Cell Regeneration, and the journal was transferred back to Springer Nature that year; articles published during an intervening period with a previous publisher, covering 2017 to 2019, remain available through an archive site, while all other content sits on the current SpringerOpen website.

This sequence — society ownership, a refreshed board and scope, and co-publication with a major international open-access publisher — is a common pattern among Chinese learned-society journals seeking a larger international readership, and it repositioned the journal. What began as an institute's journal in Guangzhou became a national society's journal, published on a global platform, with the ambition stated at relaunch of positioning itself at the forefront of basic and applied research in stem cell biology, regenerative biology and regenerative medicine.

Aims: from basic science to clinical translation

The journal's aims and scope, as published by SpringerOpen, are explicit about spanning the full arc of the field. Cell Regeneration exists to provide a worldwide platform for stem cell and regenerative biology research, both to develop basic science and to foster its clinical translation in medicine. That dual commitment shapes what it publishes: a mechanistic study of how a stem cell chooses its fate and a study aimed at a therapy are both in scope, and the journal is particularly interested in work that connects them.

The journal welcomes reports on novel discoveries, theories, methods, technologies and products. The inclusion of methods, technologies and products alongside discoveries is significant: regenerative medicine advances as much through better ways of growing, tracking, editing and delivering cells as through new biological insight, and the journal treats enabling work as first-class content rather than as supporting material.

Scope: stem cells, regeneration and biomaterials

The topics the journal lists as within its scope are embryonic stem cells; induced pluripotent stem cells; tissue-specific stem cells; tissue or organ regeneration; methodology; biomaterials and regeneration; and clinical translation or application in medicine. Read together, they map the field's structure. Embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells are the pluripotent platforms from which many cell types can be derived. Tissue-specific stem cells are the resident repair populations of organs such as blood, skin, intestine and brain. Tissue and organ regeneration is the outcome those cells are meant to achieve, whether in the body or in engineered constructs such as organoids.

Biomaterials and regeneration covers the scaffolds, matrices and niches that cells need in order to survive, organise and function — a reminder that regeneration is a problem of environment as well as of cells. The directory description adds cell fate, tissue regeneration, organoids and translational regenerative therapies as characteristic subjects, which matches the journal's published mix of original research and review articles from Chinese and international laboratories.

Research themes in the journal

The journal's thematic series show where its editors see the field moving. One series, Regeneration Across Scales: From Cells to Whole Organisms, starts from the premise that regeneration is not a mere cellular response but a coordinated cascade spanning intracellular signalling, spatial organisation and organismal scaling. Its topics run from cellular regeneration — axon regeneration, cell membrane repair, cell rejuvenation and cell transplantation — through tissue-level questions of cell-cell communication, extracellular matrix and niche interaction and the restoration of homeostasis, to whole-organism questions of inter-organ signalling and the metabolic adaptation that supports regeneration, with technologies such as advanced imaging, lineage tracing and 3D bioprinting in support.

Another series, on regeneration in emerging model organisms, reflects a distinctive strength of the field: regeneration ability varies enormously among species, and studying organisms that regenerate well — and newly developed model systems — can reveal both the common mechanisms of regeneration and why higher vertebrates have largely lost the ability. Topics in that series include mechanisms maintaining stem cell quiescence and triggering activation, dedifferentiation and transdifferentiation, the cell origins of repaired tissue, and the patterning of regeneration. Papers across the journal draw on model systems from zebrafish to mouse, and on human cell and organoid systems.

Article types and what it publishes

Cell Regeneration publishes original research articles and review articles, and its editors state a commitment to maintaining high quality standards while providing efficient peer review and publishing services. Reviews in the journal have covered subjects such as the expression patterns, functions and regulation of retrotransposons in pluripotent stem cells and early embryonic development, and highlights of work on intestinal epithelium plasticity — the kind of synthesis that helps a fast-moving field keep track of itself.

Submissions to thematic series pass through the same gate as regular submissions: the editor-in-chief reviews all submissions before peer review and may reject those that do not fit the journal's scope or meet its standards, all series articles undergo full independent peer review, and there is no guarantee of acceptance even for commissioned or invited papers. That stated policy matters for a journal that publishes invited thematic content, since it separates editorial commissioning from editorial acceptance.

Open access and publishing model

Cell Regeneration is fully open access. SpringerOpen notes the standard advantages the journal offers: maximum visibility because articles are available to a wide global audience, a fast publication schedule maintained alongside rigorous peer review, fully electronic submission and review, and publication with final citation after acceptance in both browsable web form and formatted PDF. Online publication also lets authors publish large datasets, large numbers of colour illustrations and moving pictures, and to link articles to PubMed, sequence databases and other resources. Authors retain the copyright in their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work.

For most of its recent life the journal's publication costs have been covered by the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, so authors have not paid to publish. The journal has announced a change: for manuscripts submitted before 2026 the publication costs are still covered by the Society, while for articles submitted from 1 January 2026 the author will need to pay an article processing charge if the manuscript is accepted, with waivers available for high-quality submissions through Society sponsorship and details of the new charges to be announced on the journal website. Prospective authors should therefore check the current terms on the journal site at the time they submit.

Indexing and identifiers

The journal's electronic ISSN is 2045-9769. Springer's indexing list for the journal is long and reflects its biomedical character: it includes the Emerging Sources Citation Index, PubMed Central, Scopus, EMBASE, BIOSIS and Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts Service, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Dimensions, EBSCO, ProQuest, CNKI and Google Scholar, among others. The directory listing summarises this as indexing in ESCI, PubMed Central and Scopus — the three signals most relevant to a biomedical reader, since PubMed Central archiving makes articles discoverable through the main biomedical literature infrastructure and freely readable in full text.

Articles carry DOIs under the journal's SpringerOpen registration, and the journal's earlier literature is preserved in PubMed Central, including the 2012 launch editorial, which remains a concise primary source for the journal's founding intentions.

Readership and community

The journal's readership is the international stem cell and regenerative medicine community: developmental and cell biologists, researchers working on pluripotent and tissue stem cells, biomaterials and tissue engineering specialists, and clinicians and translational scientists interested in regenerative therapies. As the official journal of the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, it also serves as a showcase for Chinese research in a field where China has invested heavily, giving that work an English-language, open-access home alongside international submissions.

For readers outside the specialty, the journal is a useful barometer of what regenerative biology currently thinks is important — which cell types, which model organisms, which enabling technologies, and which clinical targets are drawing the strongest work — because its scope statement and thematic series are revised as the field moves.

Place in regenerative medicine publishing

Stem cell and regenerative medicine publishing is dominated by a small number of high-profile general and specialist titles, most of them subscription-based or charging substantial open-access fees, and most edited from North America or Europe. Cell Regeneration's place in that landscape is as an open-access, society-owned specialist journal from China that has, since its 2019 relaunch and 2020 move to Springer co-publication, deliberately repositioned itself at the forefront of basic and applied stem cell research while keeping publication free to authors for submissions through 2025 through Society support.

Its history also makes it a small case study in the internationalisation of Chinese scientific journals: founded by a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute in Guangzhou in 2012, adopted and relaunched by a national learned society, and co-published with Springer Nature from 2020, with its content archived in PubMed Central and indexed in Scopus. For anyone tracing how Chinese cell biology presents itself to the world, Cell Regeneration is one of the titles to watch.