About Risk Sciences

Risk Sciences

Risk Sciences is an international, peer-reviewed, fully open access, general-interest journal devoted to the study of risk and uncertainty across all fields. It carries the ISSN 2950-6298 and is published by KeAi Communications Co. Ltd., with publishing services by Elsevier on ScienceDirect. The journal is jointly hosted by the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University in Beijing — Tsinghua SEM — and KeAi. Its premise is stated in its title: that the many disciplines which study risk, from finance and engineering to public health and environmental science, together form a coherent interdisciplinary field, the risk sciences, which deserves a journal of its own.

Risk Sciences publishes academic research and industry practice on risks and disruptive technologies. Its scope is deliberately not confined to one sector. The journal covers the identification, quantification, analysis, communication and governance of risks and uncertainties across all walks of life and society, and it welcomes work from agriculture, economics, engineering, environmental science, finance, health, law, management, natural sciences and public administration.

Launch at Tsinghua University

Risk Sciences was launched at the Risk Sciences Symposium and launch ceremony held at Tsinghua University on 17 June 2024. The event formed part of two anniversary celebrations at once: the 40th anniversary of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management and the 70th anniversary of Science Press, the publishing house within China Science Publishing & Media, KeAi's Chinese co-founder. Reports of the launch record that more than 200 experts attended in person and some 60,000 viewers watched online, figures that indicate the scale on which the new journal was presented.

Senior figures from the host university took part. Yang Bin, a Vice President of Tsinghua University, attended with Ma Yue, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Science Press, and Yang and Ma jointly unveiled the new journal. Other Tsinghua leaders associated with the launch in the journal's record include SEM Dean Bai Chong-En and Xue Lan, Dean of Schwarzman College, who spoke to the journal's purpose. Academic representatives at the unveiling included scholars from across Tsinghua's schools and institutes, together with international risk scholars Steven Kou of Boston University and Steven Vanduffel of the Free University of Brussels. The ceremony was hosted by Feng Runhuan, chair professor at Tsinghua SEM and the journal's founding Executive Editor-in-Chief, and Feng together with Jiang Lei, a publishing director of KeAi, introduced the journal and its publishing plan.

Speakers at the launch presented the journal as filling a gap. Yang Bin's remarks, as reported, described risk science as an interdisciplinary, cross-industry and cross-national field of study, and risk management as a question for the whole of society; he expressed the belief that the establishment of Risk Sciences would largely fill the gap in risk-related research publishing, and the hope that it would promote Tsinghua's academic research on emerging risks and the impacts of disruptive technologies across interdisciplinary fields.

The founding colloquium

To mark the launch, Tsinghua SEM and KeAi presented the inaugural Risk Sciences Colloquium, titled in KeAi's programme "The Genesis," held on 17 June 2024 in the Jianhua Building of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University. KeAi explained that world-renowned scholars were invited to present cutting-edge research, theory and practice across the interdisciplinary fields of risk sciences, and to provide guidance and suggestions for the direction and future development of the new journal. The first colloquium aimed to cultivate conversations among scholars from different disciplines about research problems and methodologies for risk and uncertainty arising from economic, societal, environmental, financial, healthcare and investment risks, disruptive technologies and risk management methodologies.

The confirmed speakers and their risk domains show how wide the journal's founding community was drawn. The programme listed Michail Anthropelos on pension and investment risks, Chong-En Bai on economic risk, Jun Bi on environmental risk, Ian Duncan on healthcare risks, Steve Kou on financial risk, Lan Xue on societal risk, Hailiang Yang on actuarial and quantitative risk management, Haibo Zhang on emergency management and Yinzi Zhu on financial technology. A journal whose founding colloquium assigns a named speaker to each major risk domain is making a structural claim: those domains belong in conversation with one another, inside one publication.

A framework: what are risk sciences?

The journal's intellectual framework is set out in its founding editorial article, "What are risk sciences?", written by founding Executive Editor-in-Chief Runhuan Feng of Tsinghua University and published in Risk Sciences, volume 1 (2025), as article 100029. Rather than offering a single narrow definition of risk, the article proposes a three-dimensional structure for organising how risks are studied and managed.

The first dimension, identification and assessment, focuses on recognising risks, evaluating their likelihood and impact, and modelling potential losses or consequences, using methods that range from causal risk-factor models in disaster research to statistical trend analysis in finance and insurance. The second dimension, mechanism and strategy, examines how risks are addressed in practice: mechanisms are concrete tools such as risk avoidance, mitigation and transfer, while strategies are broader coordinated plans, such as national catastrophe risk management systems or international risk governance frameworks, that integrate multiple tools and stakeholders. The third dimension, behaviour and decision, highlights how individuals, organisations and institutions perceive risk and make decisions under uncertainty, drawing on economics, psychology and behavioural science to explain why real-world decisions deviate from purely rational models and how cognitive biases, information asymmetry and institutional structures shape risk-related behaviour.

"Risk sciences is not a single discipline, but an ecosystem of interconnected research," Feng explains in summaries of the article. "By bringing together perspectives from natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, economics, and beyond, we can better understand complex risks and design more effective responses." Using the framework, the article reviews major research areas shaping the field, including climate and catastrophe risks, digitalisation and cybersecurity, disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, and global societal challenges, and it identifies emerging trends such as the growing use of network analysis and agent-based modelling and closer links between academic research, industry application and public policy. The article concludes by introducing the journal Risk Sciences itself as a vehicle designed to foster that interdisciplinary integration.

Scope and article types

ScienceDirect's description of the journal defines its scope in general-interest terms. Risk Sciences is a general-interest journal that publishes academic research and industry practices on risks and disruptive technologies across all fields, including agriculture, economics, engineering, environmental science, finance, health, law, management, natural sciences and public administration. Risk sciences, in the journal's definition, encompass all scientific areas that study the identification, quantification, analysis, communication and governance of risks and uncertainties across all walks of life and society.

The journal welcomes scientific work pertaining to risks and uncertainties in four article forms: original research papers, review articles, industrial case studies and perspectives. The inclusion of industrial case studies alongside research papers and reviews is a deliberate signal that practice-based evidence — how a firm, insurer, agency or operator actually identified and managed a risk — belongs in the journal beside academic modelling. The journal states a particular interest in topics of major societal impact, such as catastrophe and climate change and the safety and responsible use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Published articles in its first volumes illustrate the breadth in practice, ranging across subjects that include seismic risk management in China, cyber risk in networked systems, financial risk pricing, valuations of mortality risk reduction during COVID-19, firm-level climate risk assessment and data-driven approaches to social influence risks, all cited within the founding framework article's survey of the field.

Editorial leadership at Tsinghua SEM

The founding Executive Editor-in-Chief of Risk Sciences is Feng Runhuan, a chair professor at the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management. Professor Feng joined Tsinghua SEM as chair professor in 2023, after a long academic career in actuarial science and risk management in the United States, including at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he remains an adjunct professor in actuarial and risk management sciences. His Tsinghua curriculum vitae records his fellowship credentials in actuarial practice and his research across insurance, risk pooling and risk sharing — the subjects of the founding article's home discipline.

That background is relevant to the journal's design. Actuarial science is one of the oldest organised disciplines of risk quantification, but Risk Sciences is explicitly not an actuarial journal: its founding editor used the journal's first framework article to argue that actuarial methods form one part of a larger ecosystem that also includes disaster science, behavioural economics, engineering reliability, public administration and the study of disruptive technology. The journal's hosting by a school of economics and management, rather than by a single technical institute, reflects the same breadth: Tsinghua SEM provides an institutional home in which finance, management, economics and policy perspectives on risk naturally meet, while the journal's scope reaches well beyond the school's own disciplines.

Publishing model, fees and indexing

Risk Sciences is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal. Every peer-reviewed research article in the journal is published open access, meaning the article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format, immediately after publication. The journal is owned by KeAi Communications Co., Ltd., which retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and the compiled issues, while publishing services are provided by Elsevier and articles are hosted on ScienceDirect. Submissions to KeAi journals are automatically screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck within the editorial system to detect plagiarism, including overlapping and similar text.

The open access publication fee for Risk Sciences is USD 500, plus taxes. Unusually, and significantly for a new journal building its author base, all article processing charges for articles submitted to the journal before 31 December 2027 will be fully waived. In practice, therefore, authors submitting during the journal's first years pay nothing, while readers everywhere pay nothing at any time. The journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the standard directory listing for fully open access titles, and ScienceDirect lists its subject areas as Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty; Business, Management and Accounting (General); Economics, Econometrics and Finance (General); and Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality — a subject spread that again reflects its cross-disciplinary brief.

Publisher background: KeAi

KeAi is a distinctive publisher: a joint venture co-founded by two large scientific, technical and medical publishers, China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (CSPM) and Elsevier. Based in Beijing, KeAi was originally formed as a joint venture in the 2000s and was repurposed in 2013 as an open access journal publishing service provider. It has since developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across all scientific disciplines, with more than 110 titles indexed in Web of Science and more than 160 in Scopus, according to the publisher. KeAi leverages its parent companies' publishing and technology capabilities, including ScienceDirect hosting, editorial systems, data analytics and production.

For Risk Sciences, that structure means a Beijing-based publisher with Chinese institutional roots provides the journal's ownership and editorial support, Elsevier provides the international platform on which the journal is read, and Tsinghua University provides the academic host. The launch's dual anniversary framing — Tsinghua SEM at 40 years and Science Press at 70 years — underlined that the journal was presented as a joint institutional project of the university and the publishing group, not as a purely commercial launch.

Volumes and early publication record

The journal's first volume appeared in 2025 as Volume 1, containing the founding framework article "What are risk sciences?" (Risk Sciences 1, 100029) among its early papers. Volume 2 was in progress in 2026, with articles continuing to appear on ScienceDirect under the journal's article-numbering system in the 1000xx range. The continuation from a first volume in 2025 into a second volume in 2026 establishes the basic fact a new journal most needs to demonstrate: that its launch was followed by sustained publication, with a growing body of peer-reviewed, openly accessible articles rather than a single ceremonial issue.

The journal has also been promoted through scholarly channels beyond its own pages. KeAi announced a partnership with Cassyni, the research seminar platform, to enhance research visibility through AI-powered seminars, with KeAi's journal portfolio including the newly launched open access journal Risk Sciences featuring in the programme. Such arrangements are part of how a new open access journal builds readership: articles are free to read, but they still need to be found, presented and discussed.

Position and outlook

Risk Sciences occupies a distinctive position among new Chinese-hosted international journals. Most new titles are defined by a discipline, a technology or a disease; Risk Sciences is defined by a problem type — risk and uncertainty — that every discipline encounters. Its founding documents argue, with a named three-dimensional framework, that identification and assessment, mechanism and strategy, and behaviour and decision are common structures across fields as different as seismology, insurance and artificial intelligence governance, and the journal exists to publish work that makes those connections.

The verified record supporting the journal is comparatively complete for a recent launch: a dated launch ceremony at Tsinghua University on 17 June 2024 with named university and publisher leaders, a founding colloquium with named speakers across nine risk domains, a registered ISSN (2950-6298), a published founding framework article in a completed first volume (2025), a second volume in progress in 2026, a stated article processing charge of USD 500 with a full waiver for submissions before 31 December 2027, and listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Its future standing will depend on whether researchers across its many named fields actually choose it over their disciplinary journals — the central wager of any general-interest title — but its institutional backing from Tsinghua SEM and KeAi, and its waiver-funded free-to-publish opening period, give that wager a substantial foundation.