About Neuron Communications

Neuron Communications

Neuron Communications is an international, open-access journal published in Beijing by KeAi Communications, with publishing services provided through KeAi's partnership model, that is devoted to a single organising question: how cells in the nervous system talk to one another. The journal publishes studies exploring the molecular structures, cellular networks and functional interactions between neurons and other cell types such as glial and immune cells, in order to advance understanding of cell-to-cell interactions in the nervous system, particularly during neural development, ageing, injury and regeneration. It is a peer-reviewed, English-language title published quarterly, owned by Hong Kong Idragon Publishing Co., Ltd., and it represents a deliberately network-level entry in neuroscience publishing: rather than organising itself around a single technique, disease or brain region, it organises itself around communication itself.

A journal organised around communication

The editorial premise of Neuron Communications is stated unusually explicitly. The journal welcomes studies that go beyond single-cell or single-molecule analysis to explore the network-level, structural and functional relationships between cells, especially in the context of emerging single-cell, spatial and systems-level technologies. Research integrating molecular biology, neurophysiology, regenerative neuroscience and computational approaches to uncover cellular interactions and signalling pathways is particularly encouraged. That framing distinguishes the title within the KeAi portfolio and within neuroscience more broadly. Many journals ask what a molecule does or what a cell type is; this journal asks how signals pass between cells, how those exchanges build circuits, and what happens to development, plasticity, injury repair and disease when the exchanges change, fail or are restored.

Molecular and cellular mechanisms of neural communication

The first of the journal's five stated topic areas covers the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neural communication. Within it, the journal lists synaptic and non-synaptic signalling pathways; receptor–ligand dynamics and intracellular cascades; gap junctions, extracellular vesicles and paracrine signalling; and neuro–glial and neuro–immune communication. The breadth of that list is itself informative. Synaptic transmission sits alongside slower and more diffuse channels — vesicles released into extracellular space, direct cell-to-cell junctions, and signals exchanged with the glial and immune cells that surround neurons. A study of how a receptor and its ligand interact, or of how an intracellular cascade converts a brief signal into a lasting cellular change, belongs in the same journal as work on how microglia or astrocytes exchange signals with the neurons they support, because the journal treats all of these as parts of one communication system.

Communication in development and plasticity

The second topic area turns to communication in development and plasticity: cell–cell signalling during neurogenesis and circuit assembly, activity-dependent intercellular interactions, and the communication mechanisms underlying synaptic remodelling. The developing nervous system is built by conversation — cells signal their position, identity and needs to their neighbours as neurons are born, migrate, extend processes and form circuits — and the mature nervous system remains plastic because those conversations continue. Activity-dependent interactions, in which the firing of one cell changes the connections of another, are central both to how circuits are refined early in life and to how learning and experience reshape them later. By placing development and plasticity in a single section, the journal signals that it regards circuit assembly and circuit modification as two phases of the same communicative process, and welcomes work that follows a signalling pathway from embryonic circuit formation through to adult synaptic change.

Injury, inflammation and regeneration

The third topic area addresses injury, inflammation and regeneration, covering intercellular signalling in central and peripheral nervous system injury, communication-driven axon regeneration, neuroinflammatory signalling networks, and stem cell–host tissue communication. Injury transforms the conversation in neural tissue: damaged neurons, reactive glia and recruited immune cells exchange signals that can either limit damage or obstruct repair. Regeneration, where it succeeds, is likewise a communicative achievement, depending on growth signals reaching severed axons and on transplanted or resident stem cells integrating with host tissue. The journal's inclusion of both central and peripheral injury is significant, because the peripheral nervous system regenerates far more successfully than the central nervous system, and comparing the signalling environments of the two is one of the field's established strategies for understanding why. Work on neuroinflammatory networks fits here as well, since inflammation after injury is conducted largely through intercellular signals.

Dysregulated communication in neurological disorders

The fourth topic area examines what happens when neural communication is dysregulated in disease. It covers disorders characterised by altered neuron–glia interactions, pathogenic signalling in neurodegeneration, immune–neural crosstalk in disease, and tumour–microenvironment communication in the nervous system. This section extends the journal's premise into pathology: if healthy brain function is built from cell-to-cell signalling, then disorders of the nervous system can be studied as disorders of that signalling. Neurodegenerative diseases, in which pathogenic signalling spreads and glial responses shape progression, sit naturally in this frame, as does the crosstalk between the immune system and the nervous system in inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. The inclusion of tumour–microenvironment communication acknowledges that cancers of the nervous system also grow by exchanging signals with surrounding neural and glial tissue, and that understanding those exchanges is part of understanding the diseases themselves.

Experimental and computational approaches

The fifth topic area is methodological: experimental and computational approaches to neural communication. It includes single-cell and spatial multi-omics applied to cell–cell signalling, imaging and perturbation strategies to dissect communication pathways, computational modelling of intercellular signalling dynamics, and multi-scale integration linking molecular signalling to circuit function. This is the toolkit that makes the journal's premise practical. Single-cell and spatial technologies allow researchers to identify which cells are present in a tissue, what signals they express and which neighbours could receive them; imaging and perturbation methods test whether a suspected signal actually moves between cells and changes their behaviour; and computational models connect molecular events to the behaviour of whole circuits. By naming methods as a topic area in their own right, Neuron Communications invites papers whose main contribution is a better way of observing, testing or modelling neural communication, not only papers reporting a finished biological finding.

Editorial leadership

The journal is led by editors-in-chief Jian-Kang Liu of the School of Life Sciences and Technology at Xi'an Jiaotong University in Xi'an and Yun-Qing Li of the Department of Human Anatomy at the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi'an, together with Visar Beleugu of the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States. Enrique Cadenas of the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Southern California serves as honorary editor-in-chief. Associate editors are drawn from institutions including the University of Texas at San Antonio, Soochow University's Institute of Neuroscience, Fudan University's Institute of Brain Science, the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing and Kunming Medical University, and the wider editorial membership spans universities and hospitals in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, Israel, Bangladesh, Nigeria and the United States as well as many Chinese centres — a board structure that matches the journal's international, cross-disciplinary brief.

Open access and publishing arrangements

Neuron Communications is a peer-reviewed, fully open-access journal: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute, and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights, while KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. and the journal's owner, Hong Kong Idragon Publishing Co., Ltd., are granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights; the owner retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues. The standard open-access publication fee is USD 1,000 plus taxes, payable by authors or on their behalf by their funder or institution, but all article publishing charges for articles submitted before 31 December 2027 are fully waived, and the journal's guide for authors records that accepted manuscripts submitted between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2027 receive a full, automatic waiver, with editorial decisions made independently of the waiver and based solely on scientific merit and peer review. Peer review is conducted under the responsibility of the journal's editorial board, and the journal publishes quarterly.

Office, publisher and place in the field

The journal's managing editor is Dr Yang Xu, and its editorial office can be reached at editorialoffice@neuron-communications.org.cn; the owner's address is recorded as Room 1, Area B, Block G, Yan Lok Building, 4-12 Lin Shing Road, Chai Wan, Hong Kong. Publishing services come from KeAi Communications in Beijing, the open-access joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier, which since its repurposing as an open-access journal publishing service provider in 2013 has built a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals and provides its titles with Elsevier-linked production and dissemination infrastructure. Within that large portfolio, Neuron Communications occupies a specific niche: a communication-first neuroscience journal, spanning molecules to circuits and health to disease, whose five-part scope — mechanisms, development and plasticity, injury and regeneration, dysregulated signalling in disorders, and the single-cell, spatial and computational methods now used to study all four — is designed for researchers who study the nervous system as a network of talking cells.