About Friction

Friction

Friction is a single-blind peer-reviewed, open-access English-language journal devoted to tribology — the science and engineering of interacting surfaces in relative motion — published from Beijing. Established in 2013, it is published by Tsinghua University Press and sponsored by the State Key Laboratory of Tribology at Tsinghua University, now known as the State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment, together with the Chinese Tribology Institute, also rendered as the Tribology Institute of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society. The journal publishes theoretical and experimental research on friction, lubrication and wear, and it occupies a distinctive place among Chinese scientific journals because its publication costs are covered by Tsinghua University Press, so authors do not pay an article-processing charge even though every article is freely and permanently accessible online immediately on publication.

Origins and founding in 2013

The journal was established in 2013, with its early volumes appearing from 2013 onward and its second volume opening in January 2014. It was created as an international, English-language outlet at a time when Chinese universities and learned societies were founding English-language journals to carry domestic research directly to a global readership. Its institutional home from the start was Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of China's leading research universities, and specifically the university's State Key Laboratory of Tribology, whose researchers work on the fundamental behaviour of surfaces, films and contacts. The founding editorial for the journal's tenth anniversary, written by Jianbin Luo, Yonggang Meng, Zhongmin Jin and colleagues and published in 2022, looked back over the journal's first decade from that Tsinghua base, confirming both the laboratory affiliation of its leadership and the journal's Beijing home. The journal's print ISSN is 2223-7690 and its electronic ISSN is 2223-7704.

Publisher, sponsors and the move beyond Springer

For most of its first twelve volumes, Friction was published by Tsinghua University Press in cooperation with Springer under the SpringerOpen brand, which gave it distribution through Springer's international platform. That arrangement ended on completion of Volume 12 in 2024: the journal ceased publication with Springer Nature at that point and continued in cooperation with Tsinghua University Press alone from Volume 13 in 2025, with authors directed to the editorial office for submissions. Throughout, the sponsoring bodies have remained the State Key Laboratory of Tribology at Tsinghua University and the Chinese Tribology Institute. This continuity of sponsorship matters to the journal's identity: it is not a commercial title that happens to cover tribology, but the house journal of China's principal tribology laboratory and its national tribology community, produced with a university press rather than sold to a commercial publisher.

Scope: friction, lubrication, wear and the basic sciences

The journal's stated scope welcomes original, high-quality research papers and review articles on all aspects of tribology. Its topic lists are unusually detailed and give a clear map of the field as its editors understand it. Under friction, the journal lists the origin of friction, friction theories, new phenomena of friction, nano-friction, ultra-low friction, molecular friction, ultra-high friction, friction at high speed, friction at high or low temperature, friction at solid–liquid interfaces, bio-friction and adhesion. Under lubrication and wear it covers the behaviour of lubricants and films and the damage and degradation of surfaces in contact. A further strand covers the basic sciences of tribological systems: the principles of tribology, the thermodynamics of tribo-systems, micro-fluidics and the thermal stability of tribo-systems. The journal's own summary of its tenth-anniversary special issue highlights research fronts including nano-friction, ultra-low friction and superlubricity, and bio-friction, reflecting a scope that runs from fundamental surface physics to engineering application.

Why tribology needs a dedicated journal

An introductory article in the journal's early volumes, “Friction is an essential part of human experience,” set out the case for the field in plain terms: traction is needed to walk, stand, work and drive, while energy spent overcoming resistance to motion is a direct cost and a source of inefficiency in machinery. The journal's pages have repeatedly returned to the long history of the subject, noting that intensive study of the origin of friction began in the sixteenth century after the pioneering work of Leonardo da Vinci, and that experimenters such as Amontons and Coulomb built the foundations of modern understanding, before the age of steam engines, locomotives, automobiles, aircraft and space exploration made the control of friction and wear an industrial necessity. A dedicated journal gives that dispersed community — spanning physics, chemistry, materials science and mechanical engineering — a single venue in which fundamental studies of interfaces sit alongside applied work on bearings, films and lubricated contacts.

Peer review and open-access model

Friction operates a single-blind peer-review system: reviewers know the names and affiliations of authors, while the reports passed to authors are anonymous. It is a fully open-access journal, and all articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Unusually among open-access journals, the cost of that model does not fall on authors: the publication costs are covered by Tsinghua University Press, so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge. That combination — open access for readers, no charge for authors, and sponsorship by a national key laboratory and a learned institute — is central to how the journal presents itself, and it removes two common barriers at once: paywalls for readers in industry and smaller institutions, and publication fees for researchers without dedicated open-access funding.

Frequency, article types and special issues

The journal was described during its Springer years as published quarterly by Tsinghua University Press and Springer, and its volume sequence ran annually, reaching Volume 10 in 2022 and Volume 12 in 2024. Alongside regular research papers and reviews, the journal has made extensive use of special issues to mark and shape research fronts. The archive includes a special issue on thin film lubrication, a special issue associated with the 6th World Tribology Congress in 2017, a special issue on biomedical tribology opening Volume 10 in 2022, the tenth-anniversary special issue later that year, and a 2024 special issue on artificial intelligence and emerging computational approaches for tribology. These collections show the journal acting not only as an archive of submitted work but as an organiser of its field, convening themed issues around conferences, anniversaries and new methods.

Indexing and standing

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, listed under the Web of Science category of Engineering, Mechanical, with Tsinghua University Press recorded as its publisher. Its articles carry DOIs in the Springer-era sequence beginning 10.1007/s40544, and its citation performance has been strong for a specialist title: listings record a CiteScore of 13.80. For a journal founded only in 2013, inclusion in SCIE and a double-digit CiteScore mark it as an established international venue rather than a purely domestic one, and its English-language, open-access format means its contents are discoverable by tribologists worldwide without institutional subscriptions.

Editorial leadership and community

The journal's tenth-anniversary editorial was authored by Jianbin Luo and Yonggang Meng of the State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment at Tsinghua University, together with Zhongmin Jin and Hongbo Zeng, and correspondence for the journal has run through those Tsinghua-based editors — a leadership drawn from the sponsoring laboratory itself. The editorial office contact points published after the Springer transition are at the journal's own domain and at Tsinghua University Press, underlining that editorial control sits in Beijing with the sponsor and the university press. Around that core, the journal serves the wider Chinese tribology community gathered in the Chinese Tribology Institute while publishing authors from well beyond China, as its special issues linked to the World Tribology Congress demonstrate.

The journal in China's English-language science publishing

Friction belongs to the generation of English-language journals founded by Chinese universities, laboratories and societies in the 2000s and 2010s to internationalise Chinese research at its source. Its particular model — a national key laboratory and a professional institute as sponsors, a university press as publisher, open access funded centrally rather than by authors, and a decade published through an international partner before returning to the university press alone in 2025 — illustrates both the ambitions and the evolving economics of that movement. Within tribology, it provides a Beijing-based, internationally indexed home for work on friction, lubrication and wear, from nano-scale surface phenomena and superlubricity to the thermal and fluid behaviour of working tribo-systems, and its tenth anniversary in 2022 confirmed a journal that had moved from launch to fixture in its field within a single decade.