About Engin Future

Engin Future

Overview

Engin Future is an international, interdisciplinary, open-access peer-reviewed journal newly launched by OAE Publishing Inc., whose first volume appeared in 2026. The founding editorial, by Huan Pang and Jianning Ding, was published on 6 March 2026 as Engin Future 2026, volume 1, article 1, with DOI 10.20517/enginfuture.2026.01. Based in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, and edited by Professor Huan Pang of Yangzhou University, the journal publishes original research, reviews, perspectives and news & views across all fields of engineering, integrating fundamental engineering principles with emerging technologies across the physical, biological and digital domains. Its particular emphases are AI-driven engineering — summed up in its tagline 'AI for Engineering' — and digital twins, and its declared ambition is to serve engineers, researchers and policymakers sharing transformative ideas that address pressing global challenges and shape the future of human society.

The Founding Editorial of March 2026

The journal's public record begins with its founding editorial, 'New journal: Engin Future', received on 2 March 2026, accepted on 3 March 2026 and published on 6 March 2026. Its authors, Huan Pang and Jianning Ding, contributed equally; Pang serves as the journal's Editor-in-Chief and Ding as an editorial board member, and the editorial — as the journal's own declaration notes — was not subject to external peer review, as is conventional for a founding statement. The editorial introduces Engin Future as an open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing across all fields of engineering, and as a platform of inspiration that defines the future of engineering. Both authors are based at Yangzhou University: Pang at the Yangzhou Key Laboratory of Smart Materials and Clean Energy in the School of Chemistry and Materials, and Ding at the university's Institute of Technology for Carbon Neutralization. The speed and clarity of the launch — a dated, citable founding editorial as article 1 of volume 1 — gives the journal a clean bibliographic starting point.

Editor-in-Chief Huan Pang of Yangzhou University

Huan Pang is a professor at Yangzhou University in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, based at the Yangzhou Key Laboratory of Smart Materials and Clean Energy in the School of Chemistry and Materials. His honours include selection for the National Young Talent Program, the New Century Excellent Talents Program of the Ministry of Education of China, and the Jiangsu Provincial Distinguished Young Scholars Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in the United Kingdom and is recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher for his global research impact. He has made internationally influential contributions to the synthesis and application of nano metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and related inorganic functional materials, and has led or completed four projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, including one Key Project. Announcing his appointment, the journal's editorial office credited his distinguished scholarship, strong international influence and extensive editorial experience with providing strategic direction for the journal's development. His own field — materials chemistry for clean energy — also anchors one of the journal's core pillars, sustainable energy and chemical processes.

Mission: Engineering Integrated Across Physical, Biological and Digital Domains

Engin Future's core proposition is integration. The journal states that it is dedicated to the integration of fundamental engineering principles with emerging technologies across the physical, biological and digital domains. In its appointment announcement, the journal is described as dedicated to publishing cutting-edge advances in energy chemistry, inorganic materials and sustainable engineering, and as aiming to provide a global platform for engineers, researchers and policymakers to share transformative ideas and technological innovations that address pressing global challenges and help shape the future of human society. That breadth — all fields of engineering in a single title — is a deliberate alternative to the specialisation of most engineering publishing, where civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical and biomedical engineers rarely publish in the same venue. Engin Future bets that the most consequential engineering work of the coming decade will be precisely the work that crosses those lines.

AI for Engineering and Digital Twins

Two themes receive special emphasis. The first is AI-driven engineering, presented by the journal as 'AI for Engineering': machine learning applied to structural design, predictive maintenance and engineering decision-making, rather than artificial intelligence studied for its own sake. The second is digital twins — live computational counterparts of physical assets and systems — which the journal's scope applies across geospatial engineering and digital twin cities, industrial systems and infrastructure. These emphases recur inside the journal's pillar structure, where an Intelligent & Digital Transformation pillar covers engineering AI, robotics and autonomy, and next-generation computing including quantum engineering and edge computing in the industrial internet of things. For a journal founded in 2026, when AI methods are being absorbed into every engineering discipline at speed, these are the connective themes most likely to attract cross-disciplinary submissions.

The Eight Pillars, Part One: Frontiers, Resources, Intelligence and Energy

The journal organises its scope into eight pillars. The first, Frontier & Aerospace Engineering, covers aerospace systems — satellite technology, deep space exploration and autonomous aerial vehicles — and extreme engineering for the deep sea, polar regions and planetary habitats. The second, Geo-resources & Environmental Engineering, spans geospatial engineering (remote sensing, geographic information systems and digital twin cities), resource and mining engineering (sustainable mineral extraction, unconventional oil and gas, and geothermal energy), hydrology and marine engineering (water conservancy, coastal protection and ocean engineering), and climate engineering, including large-scale carbon removal and ecosystem restoration. The third, Intelligent & Digital Transformation, covers engineering AI, robotics and autonomy including human-machine interaction and swarming intelligence, and next-generation computing. The fourth, Sustainable Energy & Chemical Processes, covers carbon neutrality — hydrogen energy, carbon capture, utilisation and storage, and next-generation power grids — chemical engineering including green synthesis and catalytic processes, and the circular economy, including waste-to-energy and plastic upcycling.

The Eight Pillars, Part Two: Life, Infrastructure, Materials and Management

The remaining four pillars complete the map of modern engineering. Life Science & Bio-Engineering covers biomedical devices such as neural interfaces, tissue engineering and nanomedicine, and smart agriculture including precision farming, food engineering and bio-based materials. Civil & Infrastructure Engineering covers resilient infrastructure — mega-bridges, tunnels and seismic-resistant structures — smart transportation including high-speed rail, intelligent traffic systems and urban air mobility, and modern architecture including zero-carbon buildings and prefabricated construction. Materials & Mechanics covers advanced materials such as metamaterials, self-healing materials and superconductors, and applied mechanics including computational fluid dynamics and solid mechanics. Finally, Engineering Management & Education covers industrial engineering, including supply chain resilience and lean manufacturing, and ethics and society, including engineering ethics, policymaking and sustainable engineering education. The inclusion of management, ethics and education as a named pillar — not an afterthought — reflects the journal's stated ambition to serve policymakers as well as laboratory researchers.

Article Types and the Journal's Audience

Engin Future publishes four formats: high-quality research articles presenting original engineering advances; reviews synthesising fields; perspectives offering expert direction-setting; and news & views connecting the research community to developments around it. That mix suits a journal whose intended readership explicitly spans three groups — engineers in practice, researchers in academia and industry, and policymakers. Perspectives and news & views give senior figures and commentators a route to address the field's direction, while research articles and reviews carry the scholarly record. The founding editorial's authorship models the intended blend: a materials chemist and a carbon-neutralisation technologist writing together about the whole of engineering's future, from the same university in Yangzhou.

Publisher: OAE Publishing

The publisher, OAE Publishing Inc., is a multidisciplinary open-access publisher founded on 17 March 2015 and headquartered in Los Angeles, wholly owned by Mesa Investment Management Inc. OAE operates its own manuscript submission and peer-review system (MESAS), a digital publishing platform and the ScieRxiv preprint server, under the mission statement 'Open Access with Excellence'. Its authors come from 167 countries and regions and its readership spans more than 250; it maintains an APC waiver and discount policy under which, between March 2015 and late December 2025, it granted waivers or discounts for 6,698 articles worth more than 17.7 million US dollars. Its portfolio's recent record includes 17 journals receiving impact factors in the 2024 Journal Citation Reports, six of them in Q1. Engin Future is published open access under a Creative Commons licence, with copyright retained by its authors — the founding editorial carries a 2026 author copyright line — making all of its content free to read worldwide from publication.

Yangzhou, Jiangsu: The Journal's Home Base

Although OAE is headquartered in Los Angeles, Engin Future's editorial home is Yangzhou, a city in Jiangsu province with a long engineering heritage on the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. Both founding figures are at Yangzhou University, a comprehensive provincial university whose chemistry, materials and carbon-neutralisation institutes give the journal immediate depth in energy and materials engineering — the subjects of the Editor-in-Chief's own laboratory, the Yangzhou Key Laboratory of Smart Materials and Clean Energy. That anchoring matters for a journal claiming all of engineering: its first community is local and specialist, while its eight-pillar scope and international publisher are designed to widen that community discipline by discipline and country by country.

Outlook

Engin Future begins in 2026 with a dated founding editorial, an Editor-in-Chief who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Highly Cited Researcher, an exceptionally broad eight-pillar scope, and an established open-access publisher. Its wager is that engineering's future is integrative — AI methods inside every discipline, digital twins over physical infrastructure, energy and sustainability constraints on every design — and that a single journal organised around that integration can attract work that specialist titles divide among themselves. The test will be whether its first volumes deliver papers that genuinely cross the pillars: engineering AI applied to infrastructure, bio-engineering informed by materials science, and management and ethics scholarship read by practising engineers. On its founding documents, that is exactly the journal Pang and Ding set out to build.