About eLight

eLight

eLight is an open-access journal of optics and photonics launched in 2021, co-published by the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Changchun, Jilin, and Springer Nature. It was created with an unusually explicit ambition: to attract, in its editors' words, the finest and most exciting research results in optics and photonics, and to disseminate them widely and quickly. Managed by the same Changchun team that created Light: Science & Applications, one of the world's leading optics journals, eLight is the younger, more selective sister title — a journal designed from the start around breakthrough papers, cross-disciplinary reach, transparent peer review and accompanying commentaries, rather than around volume of publication.

Overview and identity

The journal's own aims and scope are short and deliberate. eLight aims to attract the finest manuscripts, broadly covering all sub-fields of optics, photonics and electromagnetics, with a particular focus on emerging topics and cross-disciplinary research related to optics. It is an online open-access journal: all articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers, and because articles are not printed they carry a unique article number rather than page numbers. The journal is identified by ISSN 2097-1710 and electronic ISSN 2662-8643. Its base is Changchun, a city with a long institutional history in Chinese optics centred on the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP), and its publishing operation is the institute's Light Publishing Group — the same group responsible for the institute's established journal programme. The name itself, announced in the launch editorial "eLight: enlightening and exploring light," states the editorial programme in two verbs: to illuminate the field, and to explore where light-based science is going next.

Launch in 2021 and the Changchun partnership

Preparation for eLight began in late 2019, and the journal officially launched in June 2021. Its first article — the launch editorial by its two editors-in-chief, Aydogan Ozcan and Cheng-Wei Qiu — appeared on 8 June 2021 as volume 1, article 1. In that editorial the editors explained the founding motivation directly: optics and photonics research had fundamentally reformed understanding of nature, and those transformative advances motivated a new journal to showcase emerging groundbreaking research driven by optics and photonics in a timely way. The journal is co-published by CIOMP and Springer Nature, and it was selected as one of China's high-profile new journals under the national programme to build world-class Chinese scientific journals — a designation the launch editorial itself notes. That combination — a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute in Changchun as the institutional publisher, Springer Nature as co-publisher and distribution partner, and national high-profile-new-journal status from the outset — gave eLight an unusually high starting point for a new title, which its editors repeatedly describe as a responsibility to publish only work of exceptional significance.

Relationship to Light: Science & Applications

eLight cannot be understood apart from its sister journal. It is managed by the same team that created Light: Science & Applications, the Changchun-based optics journal that became a leading international title in its field. A published case study of the journal's development describes the relationship explicitly as a flagship journal guiding the innovative development of its sister journal: the editorial office, experience and networks built around Light: Science & Applications were used to construct eLight from a high starting point rather than from scratch. The division of labour between the two titles is one of breadth and selectivity. Where the flagship publishes a broad flow of strong optics research, eLight was positioned to take a smaller number of papers chosen for profound, often interdisciplinary, impact. The case study notes that, in article selection, eLight prioritises a manuscript's profound interdisciplinary impact above popularity or citation potential — an editorial rule that explains both its small output relative to its field and the outsized attention individual papers have received.

Aims and scope across optics, photonics and electromagnetics

Formally, the scope covers all sub-fields of optics, photonics and electromagnetics. In practice, the journal's published content and its stated focus point to the moving frontier of light science: how light is generated, controlled, structured and detected, and what that control makes possible in other disciplines. Topics represented in its pages include light–matter interaction, lasers, optical materials, quantum optics, metasurfaces and nanophotonics, structured light, imaging and computational optics — the areas named in the journal's founding description as breakthrough research across optics and photonics, including light–matter interaction, lasers, optical materials and quantum optics. The inclusion of electromagnetics in the scope statement is significant: it brings work on waves, antennas and metamaterials at frequencies beyond the visible into the same conversation as photonics, reflecting how modern optics groups actually work across those boundaries. Featured articles on the journal's homepage have included "Structured light meets machine intelligence" and work on massively parallel approximation of nonlinear functions using diffractive processors — titles that show the journal's centre of gravity where optics meets computing and artificial intelligence.

Emerging and cross-disciplinary research as an editorial priority

What distinguishes eLight from a conventional optics journal is not the list of topics but the selection principle applied to them. The journal states its focus on emerging topics and cross-disciplinary research related to optics, and its editors put that principle into practice by publishing first-of-their-kind results even when they do not come from fashionable fields. The published case study of the journal cites two examples: the first work on brainwave-controlled metamaterials, and the first work on vectorial adaptive optics — neither, the study notes, from a hot field, but both achieving massive cross-disciplinary impact because of their revolutionary nature. That is a recognisable editorial bet: a metamaterial controlled by brainwaves speaks simultaneously to neuroscience, materials science and electromagnetic engineering, and a journal that requires only optics significance might have missed why it mattered. eLight's model instead asks what a result changes across disciplines, and uses an editorial board built for breadth — reported in the case study as 40 percent academicians and 75 percent international members — as arbiters when reviewers disagree about pioneering work.

Editorial leadership: Ozcan and Qiu

The journal's founding editors-in-chief are Aydogan Ozcan and Cheng-Wei Qiu, who jointly wrote the launch editorial and share correspondence for it. Ozcan, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, is Chancellor's Professor and the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Innovation at UCLA and an HHMI Professor, leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory in UCLA's electrical engineering and bioengineering departments and serving as associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute. His research profile — telemedicine, mobile health, nanoscopy, wide-field and lensless imaging, nonlinear and fibre optics and optical coherence tomography, with more than 85 issued patents recorded in his journal biography — brings a biomedical-imaging and computational-optics perspective to the journal's leadership. Qiu, at the National University of Singapore, is known for research on structured light for beam manipulation and nanoparticle manipulation, with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications recorded in his journal biography, bringing a metasurface, structured-light and light–matter-interaction perspective. Between them, the two editors embody the journal's two poles: optics as a tool for seeing and measuring life, and optics as a way of structuring light itself.

A transparent, fast and commentary-led publishing model

The launch editorial set out a publishing model that was unusual in its explicitness. First, a transparent, fair and rapid peer-review process that would publicly share referee comments and authors' responses, with the consensus of authors and reviewers. Second, a fast publication pipeline with an expected turnaround of about 60 days, multiple public dissemination channels, and press-release sharing of results with the public and research community. Third, each accepted paper would be accompanied by a Commentary, so that a breakthrough paper arrives with expert context rather than alone. These are not decorative promises; they define how the journal presents itself to authors deciding where to send an exceptional result. An author with a field-changing optics paper is offered speed, visibility, an accompanying expert commentary and a review record that can be opened to readers — in exchange for submitting to a journal that accepts only a small fraction of what it could publish and explicitly judges submissions on interdisciplinary significance.

Open access with charges covered by the institute

eLight is a fully open-access journal under the SpringerOpen model, and its access terms are among the most author-friendly in high-end optics publishing. The journal's own author information states that the publication costs of eLight are covered by the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge. All articles are freely and permanently accessible online immediately on publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. This is sometimes described as diamond open access in journal listings: neither readers nor authors pay. For a journal aiming at the finest manuscripts in its field, removing the article-processing charge removes a real friction — an author choosing between selective venues does not have to find several thousand dollars to publish in this one — and it underlines that the journal is financed as a national flagship project by its Changchun institute rather than as a commercial article-volume operation.

Indexing, first impact factor and early record

The journal's founding description records indexing in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, and a case study of its development records indexing in ESCI, EI and Scopus during its first years. Its citation record arrived quickly for so young a title. The same case study reports that in July 2024 eLight received its first impact factor of 27.2, ranking second in the international optics field — an exceptional first figure that reflects both the selectivity of its early volumes and the attention its papers attracted. The study also reports that, since its founding, eLight articles averaged more than 10,000 downloads and around 70 media mentions per article, with coverage by hundreds of global media outlets including Xinhua News Agency and multiple appearances on social-media trending lists. Those numbers should be read as the journal's own development record rather than as independent audit, but they are consistent with the publishing model: few papers, each pushed hard through commentary, press and social channels, will produce exactly that pattern of very high per-article attention.

Place in Changchun and in Chinese optics publishing

For a directory of world media, eLight marks a stage in the development of Chinese scientific publishing. Changchun's optics institute built first a respected national journal programme, then an international flagship in Light: Science & Applications, and then, in 2021, a deliberately elite sister journal intended to compete for the single best optics papers in the world — edited from Changchun and Singapore-and-Los Angeles leadership, published with Springer Nature, free for both readers and authors, and financed by its institute as a matter of national journal-building policy. Whether a researcher encounters it through a brainwave-controlled metamaterial, a diffractive processor performing computation with light, or a commentary accompanying a breakthrough imaging paper, eLight is designed to be met as an event rather than as a routine issue. That design — small, selective, fast, transparent and heavily promoted — is the journal itself, as much as any individual article it has published since June 2021.