About Frontiers of STS (Science, Technology and Society)

Frontiers of STS (Science, Technology and Society)

Overview

Frontiers of STS (Science, Technology and Society) is a journal of Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China, selected on 5 December 2025 for the 2025 High-Starting-Point New Journal Project under Phase II (2024–2028) of the China Science and Technology Journals Excellence Action Plan, and scheduled to launch in 2026. Its Editor-in-Chief is Zhang Liqun, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of XJTU, with Professor Liang Jun of the School of Marxism as executive editor. The journal is co-hosted by the School of Marxism and the XJTU Journal Center. It focuses on the ethical challenges and social governance issues brought by cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and the life sciences, and aims to build a high-end academic platform for interdisciplinary research on science, technology and society. In a 2025 XJTU cohort dominated by engineering titles — elastomers, intelligent equipment and quantum devices — Frontiers of STS is the deliberate counterweight: the journal that studies what the other journals' technologies do to society, and how society should govern them.

Selection and the Shape of the XJTU Cohort

The 2025 high-starting-point round, announced on 5 December 2025, selected 70 new-journal projects nationally under Phase II (2024–2028) of the China Science and Technology Journals Excellence Action Plan, the programme jointly organised by seven authorities including the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) to raise Chinese journals to international competitiveness. Six XJTU journals were selected, ranking the university second nationally and taking its five-year total under the plan to 16 selections. Frontiers of STS is published in English, like its sister titles, which for an STS journal is a pointed choice: it places Chinese scholarship on technology ethics and governance directly into the international conversation, in the language in which that conversation is mostly conducted, rather than reporting it second-hand. The School of Marxism as academic host also matters for interpretation: in Chinese universities, schools of Marxism house much of the institutional research on science and technology philosophy, ethics and social theory, so the journal's home is the university's recognised centre for reflective scholarship on science and society.

Editor-in-Chief: Zhang Liqun

That the university president serves as Editor-in-Chief is the journal's most distinctive founding fact. Zhang Liqun, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of XJTU since March 2024, is by training a materials scientist — degrees from Beijing University of Chemical Technology (1990, 1992, 1995), research periods at the University of Akron and Case Western Reserve University, the deanship at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and the presidency of South China University of Technology before XJTU, with a research record in rubber nanocomposites and bio-based elastomers recognised by the ACS Rubber Division's Sparks–Thomas Award and national invention and progress prizes. He simultaneously serves as Editor-in-Chief of the sister journal Advanced Elastomers. His dual editorship is legible as an institutional statement: the same leader who champions a frontier technology journal also champions the journal charged with examining frontier technology's ethics and governance. For an STS title, a sitting university president and academy member in the editor's chair gives the journal convening power across the natural sciences, engineering and the humanities — the three constituencies STS research must hold in one room — and signals that the university regards the reflective study of technology as a first-order academic mission, not an ornament.

Executive Editor and Host School

Professor Liang Jun of the School of Marxism is executive editor, and the school co-hosts the journal with the XJTU Journal Center. The pattern matches the other 2025 XJTU titles — academician editor-in-chief, professor of the host school as executive editor, Journal Center as publishing partner — but the academic centre of gravity differs: where the sister journals' executive editors run laboratories, Liang Jun's school works in philosophy, ethics, social theory and the history and philosophy of science and technology. The executive editorship therefore sits with the disciplinary community that will supply much of the journal's authorship and refereeing in philosophy of technology, technology ethics, science policy and sociology of science, while the Journal Center supplies the professional publishing operations it provides across the XJTU portfolio, including established internationally recognised titles such as the Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis.

Scope: Ethics of Emerging Technologies

The journal focuses on the ethical challenges brought by cutting-edge technologies, with artificial intelligence and the life sciences named explicitly in its founding description. Those two fields generate the defining ethics caseload of the decade. In artificial intelligence: algorithmic bias and accountability, autonomous decision-making, data rights and privacy, the governance of generative models, AI in medicine, education and public administration, and the distribution of AI's benefits and harms. In the life sciences: gene editing and human enhancement, synthetic biology and biosecurity, brain–computer interfaces, reproductive technologies, and the ethics of human-subject and animal research at new technical capability levels. An STS journal hosted in China adds perspectives that the predominantly North American and European STS literature cannot supply from within: different regulatory traditions, different public relationships to state-led technology programmes, and the lived experience of the world's largest deployment environment for digital platforms, surveillance-adjacent technologies and applied AI. The journal's founding aim is to make those perspectives part of the primary international literature.

Scope: Social Governance of Science and Technology

The journal's second focus, social governance, extends beyond ethics in the narrow philosophical sense to the institutions that steer technology: science and technology policy, research funding and evaluation systems, innovation policy, technology assessment, standard-setting, risk regulation, public engagement and the governance of research integrity. Its founding description states the aim plainly — to build a high-end academic platform for interdisciplinary research on science, technology and society. Interdisciplinarity is not a courtesy word here: governance research requires philosophers who understand the technology, engineers who understand the regulation, and policy scholars who understand both, and journals that accept only one of those literacies routinely publish governance analysis that practitioners cannot use. Frontiers of STS is structured — president as editor, Marxism school as host, engineering university as publisher — to force the three literacies into a single review process.

The STS Field and the Chinese Conversation

Science and technology studies emerged internationally as the scholarly field that examines how scientific knowledge and technological systems are made, and how they remake the societies that make them. Its classic questions — who decides what research is done, whose knowledge counts, how risk and expertise are distributed, how technologies encode values — have become urgent public questions as AI systems enter courts, hospitals, classrooms and labour markets, and as biotechnology acquires editing power over genomes. China is simultaneously one of the largest producers of the technologies in question and an active builder of governance frameworks for them, from AI governance principles to biosecurity law. A high-starting-point English-language STS journal from a major Chinese engineering university therefore fills a documented structural gap: the international STS literature gains a primary venue edited from within the Chinese university system, and Chinese STS scholars gain a journal whose programme backing, editorial leadership and publisher are designed for international standing from the first issue.

Relationship to Its Sister Journals

Read alongside its cohort, Frontiers of STS completes an unusually self-aware publishing design. Advanced Elastomers develops new materials; Intelligent Equipment develops autonomous machines; Quantum Devices and Systems develops measurement technologies of unprecedented sensitivity. Each creates capabilities whose social consequences — environmental burdens of materials, labour and safety consequences of intelligent machines, dual-use and surveillance consequences of quantum sensing — are precisely the subject matter of the fourth journal. Whether or not the four editorial offices ever formally collaborate, their simultaneous founding by one university, under one national programme, with one president editing both the materials journal and the society journal, records a deliberate institutional position: that a great engineering university should publish the governance of technology with the same seriousness as the technology itself.

Status, Readership and Outlook

Frontiers of STS (Science, Technology and Society) is scheduled to launch in 2026; its public record at the time of writing is its national selection of 5 December 2025, its editorial leadership and its declared scope. Its intended readership spans STS scholars, philosophers and ethicists of technology, science-policy researchers, sociologists of science, and the engineers, funders and regulators who increasingly need that scholarship in usable form. For authors, it offers something rare — an English-language, programme-backed STS venue edited from a top Chinese engineering university, led by its president, and explicitly chartered to treat the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, the life sciences and other cutting-edge technologies as first-class research. Its success will be measured by whether the international STS community comes to cite it as a primary source; its founding conditions give that ambition a credible start.