About Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is an open-access journal published on the SpringerOpen platform of Springer Nature, affiliated with the Institute of Information Engineering (IIE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. Launched in 2018, it is billed by its publisher as the first open-access journal devoted to cybersecurity. The journal aims to systematically cover all essential aspects of cybersecurity, with a focus on reporting cyberspace security issues, the latest research results, and the real-world deployment of security technologies. It carries the print ISSN 2096-4862 and the electronic ISSN 2523-3246, and its articles are freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. Its editor-in-chief is Dan Meng of the Institute of Information Engineering. This profile concerns the SpringerOpen journal of this name, which should not be confused with Oxford University Press's Journal of Cybersecurity, a different title from a different publisher.

Origins and institutional base

The journal was launched in 2018 — its citation record and Scopus coverage both begin in that year — as the journal of a young but central institution in China's information-security research landscape. The Institute of Information Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based in Beijing, is the journal's affiliated institute: it covers the journal's article-processing charges under the arrangements described on the journal's pages, and its researchers lead the journal editorially. Launching a dedicated, open-access, English-language journal was a deliberate act of field-building: cybersecurity research had long appeared inside general computer-science, communications and information-security journals, and Cybersecurity set out to give the field as a whole — its theory, its measurements and its deployed defences — a single systematic home.

Aims and scope

The journal's stated aim is to systematically cover all essential aspects of cybersecurity, focusing on cyberspace security issues, the latest research results, and real-world deployment of security technologies. It publishes research articles and reviews. The emphasis on deployment is distinctive: alongside theoretical and experimental work, the journal explicitly values research that reports how security technologies perform in real systems, which reflects its home in an applied national research institute rather than a purely academic department. Its scope statement is deliberately exhaustive — "all essential aspects" — and the topic list that follows it, set out in the next section, ranges from mathematical cryptography to the security of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.

Subject coverage

The journal publishes research articles and reviews in areas including, but not limited to: cryptography and its applications; network and critical infrastructure security; hardware security; software and system security; cybersecurity data analytics; data-driven security and measurement studies; adversarial reasoning; malware analysis; privacy-enhancing technologies and anonymity; Internet of Things (IoT) security; and AI security. Read as a map, that list covers the full defensive stack: the mathematics of encryption, the protection of networks and the critical infrastructure that depends on them, the trustworthiness of hardware and software, the analysis of attacks and malware, the measurement of the real internet's security, and the protection of privacy. The inclusion of data analytics, measurement studies and adversarial reasoning marks the journal's openness to empirical and strategic approaches, not only to protocol and algorithm design.

Editorial leadership

The editor-in-chief is Dan Meng (listed on the journal site as MENG Dan), a full professor at the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. According to his journal biography, his work focuses on network and system security and parallel distributed processing; he has led important research projects including the Dawning supercomputers, a National Science and Technology Major Project, the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China, and a strategic priority research programme of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; he has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers; and he is the director of the Institute of Information Engineering, after serving as its deputy director and as deputy director of the High Technology Research and Development Bureau of CAS. The executive editor-in-chief is Peng Liu. The journal states that it is served by a dedicated international editorial board, intended to give authors a thorough and swift editorial response.

Publishing model and article charges

Cybersecurity is a SpringerOpen open-access journal: all articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers, and authors are the copyright holders of their articles, granting third parties the right to use, reproduce or disseminate them under the licence terms. For most of its life the journal's publication costs were covered by the Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, so that authors did not need to pay an article-processing charge — an arrangement the journal's About pages state directly. The journal's home page has since announced a change: from 30 September 2025, 50 per cent of the full article-processing charge applies for each article accepted for publication in Cybersecurity. Authors should therefore check the journal's current pages at submission time, since the historic no-charge arrangement no longer describes the whole position.

Peer review and editorial process

Manuscripts are assessed through peer review, the system used to evaluate a manuscript's originality, validity and significance before publication: independent researchers in the relevant area review submissions and advise the editors, and all manuscripts must adhere to SpringerOpen's editorial policies. Articles are published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form and as formatted PDFs, and the full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation, with access also through SpringerLink. The journal also organises thematic series — special collections on focused topics, edited by guest editors drawn from the research community; recent series listed on its site have been edited by groups including Yang Liu, Peng Liu, Gang Li, Zhenkai Liang and others — which serve as entry points into active subfields.

Indexing and metrics

Scopus coverage of Cybersecurity runs from 2018, its launch year, and directory listings record the journal as indexed in Scopus, the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science, DOAJ and UGC CARE. Journal-listing data based on Scopus records a CiteScore of 8.6 and first-quartile (Q1) rankings across several computer-science categories, including Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems and Software, with a SCImago Journal Rank above 1.0 — a strong showing for a journal founded in 2018, reflecting rapid citation uptake in a fast-growing field. Such metrics are revised annually and vary between listing services, so readers needing a figure for a particular year should consult the Scopus or Web of Science record directly; the durable facts are the journal's continuous coverage since 2018 and its Q1 standing in its categories.

Notable content and research character

The journal's most-cited work illustrates its empirical, deployment-aware character. Its most-cited article, as recorded in research-listing profiles of the journal, is a survey of intrusion detection systems covering techniques, datasets and challenges — a reference work for a core defensive technology — followed by a heavily cited study of cybersecurity for the Controller Area Network (CAN) communication protocol used in vehicles, and work on a context-based detection framework for advanced persistent threats. Bibliometric profiles of the journal show its published research concentrating in computer security, information security and encryption, with strong threads in intrusion detection, malware and anomaly detection. In other words, the journal's centre of gravity is the detection and defeat of real attacks on real systems, exactly as its scope statement promises.

Readership and role

Cybersecurity addresses researchers and advanced practitioners in computer and network security: cryptographers, systems and network defenders, malware analysts, privacy researchers and security-data scientists, in universities, institutes and industry. For China's large security-research community it provides an English-language, open-access, institute-backed journal of record at home, at a time when Chinese groups contribute a growing share of the world's security publications. For international readers it provides a channel into Chinese cybersecurity research — including measurement and deployment studies from the Institute of Information Engineering's orbit — that is freely readable without a subscription. Its claim to be the first open-access journal on cybersecurity, its institute funding model, and its systematic scope together make it a useful marker of how cybersecurity matured, during the 2010s, from a topic inside other fields into a discipline with journals of its own.

Practical information

Cybersecurity is published by SpringerOpen (Springer Nature), affiliated with the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Print ISSN: 2096-4862. Electronic ISSN: 2523-3246. Launched: 2018. Editor-in-chief: Dan Meng; executive editor-in-chief: Peng Liu. The journal is open access and in English, and is indexed in Scopus, the Emerging Sources Citation Index and DOAJ. Its official home is cybersecurity.springeropen.com, where the aims and scope, editorial board, thematic series and submission system are maintained, and its articles are also available through SpringerLink. Readers citing the journal use the abbreviation Cybersecurity. Because the journal's article-processing arrangements changed in 2025, prospective authors should verify the current charge on the journal's own pages before submitting.