About Element

Element

Element is an international, peer-reviewed, gold open-access journal published by OAE Publishing Inc. It was officially launched on 30 September 2025, with Volume 1 in 2025 and Volume 2 in 2026, and a board of 66 editors. Its Editor-in-Chief is Fudi Wang, Qiushi Distinguished Professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, described by the publisher as a leading authority on metal metabolism and ferroptosis. The journal is dedicated to research on elements in biology, medicine, chemistry, environmental science and materials science, with a particular focus on metal biology, trace elements, disease mechanisms and interdisciplinary innovation. It received OAE's New Journal of the Year award in January 2026.

Element is built around a deliberate double meaning. Its aims and scope explore the dual dimensions of Element and Core: elements as the material foundation of science, and element as the fundamental essence — the core logic or genius — of a discipline. On the material side it prioritises the properties, functions and applications of elements across five disciplinary areas. On the essence side it welcomes groundbreaking work that probes the core logic of a discipline even without a direct tie to a chemical element. That unusual breadth, held together by a single word, is the journal's defining editorial idea.

Launch, publisher and editorial board

Element was officially launched on 30 September 2025. Volume 1 appeared in 2025 and Volume 2 followed in 2026. The journal is published by OAE Publishing Inc. and is hosted on the publisher's platform at oaepublish.com/element, where its aims and scope, articles and editorial information are listed. Its board numbers 66 editors, a substantial founding board for a new interdisciplinary title, reflecting the range of fields the journal intends to review credibly: life sciences, medicine and public health, chemistry, environmental and Earth sciences, and engineering and materials science, together with the core-logic work it invites from physics, astronomy and agronomy.

The journal reports a median time to first editorial decision of 3 days on its homepage. That figure is the publisher's stated median and is recorded here as such. In January 2026 the journal received OAE's New Journal of the Year award, an early publisher-level recognition shared in timing with its sister new title Iontronics, which received the same award. As with any journal launched in 2025, readers should judge Element primarily on the coherence of its scope, the standing of its editor and board, and the articles it publishes in Volumes 1 and 2, rather than on long-run bibliometric measures it has not yet had time to accumulate.

Editor-in-Chief: Fudi Wang

The Editor-in-Chief is Fudi Wang, Qiushi Distinguished Professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou. The founding description identifies him as a leading authority on metal metabolism and ferroptosis. That expertise sits at the centre of the journal's material focus. Metal metabolism concerns how organisms take up, transport, store and use metal elements, without which many essential processes cannot run and with excess of which serious harm can follow. Ferroptosis is an element-dependent form of cell death driven by iron, and it is expressly named in the journal's scope as an example of element-dependent cell fate, alongside cuproptosis, the copper-dependent counterpart.

An editor whose own field is metals in biology gives Element a clear anchor. Interdisciplinary journals risk becoming collections of unrelated papers; an anchor discipline — here, metal biology and trace elements in health and disease — gives reviewers, authors and readers a centre of gravity. From that centre, the journal reaches outward to chemistry, environmental science, materials science and, through its core dimension, to fundamental questions in other disciplines. The Hangzhou base at Zhejiang University School of Medicine is the journal's home for directory purposes.

The material element: life sciences and medicine

On its material side, Element prioritises submissions exploring elements' properties, functions and applications, beginning with life sciences and with medicine and public health. In life sciences, its stated directions include metallic ion signalling, with examples such as zinc sparks in embryonic development and copper's role in immune cell activation; elemental metabolism, including iron-sulfur cluster assembly in mitochondria and selenium's integration into selenoproteins; and element-dependent cell fate, including ferroptosis and cuproptosis. These examples show the level of specificity the journal expects: not general claims about metals being important, but defined mechanisms by which a named element signals, is metabolised, or decides a cell's fate.

In medicine and public health, the journal covers research linking elements to disease mechanisms and interventions, such as elemental imbalance in pathogenesis, including iron overload in thalassemia and iodine deficiency in cretinism; element-based therapeutics, including arsenic trioxide for leukemia and platinum complexes for cancer; and public health strategies, including selenium-fortified salt for Keshan disease and fluoridated water for dental caries prevention. That range — from molecular pathogenesis to population-level prevention — matches the Editor-in-Chief's field and gives clinicians, public health researchers and basic scientists a shared set of questions: where does an element help, where does it harm, in what dose and form, and with what evidence?

The material element: chemistry, environment and materials

The remaining material areas extend the same questions beyond the body. In chemistry, the journal investigates atomic structure and reactivity, including noble gas compound synthesis and superheavy element stability; catalytic processes, including elemental catalysts in carbon capture and enzyme-mediated elemental transformations; and elemental material design, including metal-organic frameworks for element storage. In environmental and Earth sciences, it covers global elemental circulation, including carbon sequestration in oceans and mercury deposition in ecosystems; geochemical distribution, including selenium-deficient soil mapping and arsenic contamination in groundwater; and elemental effects on biodiversity, including trace elements in pollinator health and heavy metals in aquatic life.

In engineering and materials science, it covers functional materials, including silicon-based photovoltaics and lithium-ion battery cathodes; elemental recycling, including rare earth element recovery from e-waste; and industrial elemental control, including heavy metal removal in manufacturing wastewater. Together, these five material areas — life sciences, medicine and public health, chemistry, environmental and Earth sciences, and engineering and materials science — form the journal's primary scope. A useful test of fit is whether a manuscript advances knowledge of a specific element's properties, functions or applications in one of those areas, especially where metal biology, trace elements or disease mechanisms are involved.

The core dimension: element as fundamental essence

Beyond material elements, Element embodies the fundamental essence — described in its scope as the Genius, as translated in Chinese — of scientific inquiry. Under this second dimension it welcomes groundbreaking work that probes the core logic of any discipline, even without direct ties to traditional elements. In life sciences, that includes foundational biological mechanisms such as the genius of cell fate determination, including stem cell differentiation hierarchies; genetic information transmission, including DNA repair mechanisms; and intercellular communication, including signal transduction cascades. In medicine, it includes the genius of disease origins and treatments, the root causes of chronic illnesses such as metabolic syndrome's molecular triggers, precision medicine targets such as genetic markers for drug response, and regenerative therapy principles such as tissue engineering scaffolds.

The core dimension also reaches physics and astronomy, including the origin of elements in the universe through stellar nucleosynthesis, the quantum behaviour of fundamental particles such as the Higgs boson's role in mass generation, and planetary habitability's elemental prerequisites such as iron cores for magnetic fields; chemistry, including reaction kinetics, chemical bonding principles and synthetic chemistry fundamentals such as green chemistry; and agronomy and environmental engineering, including soil-plant elemental symbiosis such as phosphorus uptake in crops, climate-resilient agriculture, and ecological restoration. Authors using this route should make the core-logic claim of their work explicit, since it is that claim, rather than an elemental subject, that brings the work within scope.

Article types and open access

Element welcomes submissions of original research articles, review articles, editorials, correspondence, and News and Views. Original research is the core of both dimensions of the scope. Reviews can organise a field as element-centred as metal biology or as broad as elemental cycles in the environment. Editorials, correspondence and News and Views provide commentary and debate. The journal is gold open access, meaning its published articles are freely available to readers under the publisher's open-access model; authors should check the journal site for the current article processing charge and any waiver arrangements before submitting, since those terms are set by the publisher and can change.

The journal highlights life sciences and medicine while embracing chemistry, engineering, materials science and agronomy, in the words of its aims and scope, publishing cutting-edge research that transcends disciplines and uncovers the fundamental essence of scientific innovation. Early homepage content reflects the life-science emphasis, including an interview feature on autophagy networks and neurodegeneration and organelle-level cellular control. That mix — element-specific research, interdisciplinary applications, and core-mechanism features — is the practical expression of the dual scope described above.

Interdisciplinary innovation and disease mechanisms

Two phrases in the journal's founding description deserve emphasis because they explain what kinds of papers the editors most want. The first is disease mechanisms. Element places a particular focus on metal biology, trace elements and disease mechanisms. Many of its named examples are disease mechanisms in elemental form: iron overload, iodine deficiency, ferroptosis and cuproptosis as cell-death mechanisms, and elemental imbalance as a driver of pathogenesis. Researchers who can show how an element, its deficiency, its excess or its mishandling produces or modifies disease are addressing the journal's stated centre.

The second phrase is interdisciplinary innovation. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary innovation across biology, medicine, chemistry, environmental science and materials science. In practice that favours work that crosses a boundary with a result: a materials advance that enables a biological measurement, an environmental exposure finding that explains a disease pattern, a chemical method that makes an elemental therapy or a recycling process possible. Single-discipline work within a named scope area is within the journal's remit, but the founding language rewards authors who connect fields through the element they study.

Hangzhou home and place among new journals

Element's Editor-in-Chief is based at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and the journal is catalogued in this directory under Hangzhou, China. Its publisher, OAE Publishing Inc., gives it an international open-access platform, and its 66-editor board gives it reviewing breadth across its five material areas and its core dimension. Launched on 30 September 2025, with Volume 1 in 2025, Volume 2 in 2026, and OAE's New Journal of the Year award in January 2026, it belongs to the same 2025 cohort of new China-connected OAE titles as Iontronics, while addressing a far broader subject.

In summary, Element, edited by Fudi Wang of Zhejiang University School of Medicine and published by OAE Publishing, is a gold open-access journal organised around a single, expansive idea: that elements — as materials that signal, nourish, poison, catalyse, store energy and build devices, and as a metaphor for the core logic of a discipline — can hold together a genuinely interdisciplinary journal. For researchers working on metal biology, trace elements and disease mechanisms in Hangzhou, across China and internationally, and for scientists pursuing the fundamental essence of a problem in any of its named fields, Element offers a new and deliberately distinctive home.