About Safety Emergency Science

Safety Emergency Science

Overview and identity

Safety Emergency Science, abbreviated SES, is a peer-reviewed, fully open-access international journal published by Tsinghua University Press in Beijing on the press's SciOpen platform, with academic support from Tsinghua University and the China Association of Work Safety. It appears on the official Tsinghua University Press journal list with online ISSN 3079-501X. The journal describes itself — and is described by its founders — as China's first international academic journal dedicated exclusively to safety and emergency science and technology. It aims to publish cutting-edge research in the science and technology of safety and emergency response, extending from work safety, occupational safety and industrial safety to natural disasters, prevention and emergencies, and involving the latest progress across multiple disciplines. Volume 1 appeared in 2025 and Volume 2 in 2026, and the journal actively recruits contributors and young editorial board members worldwide.

Founding and launch

Safety Emergency Science was jointly established by the China Association of Work Safety and Tsinghua University, and it made its debut at the 2nd Safety Technology Innovation Conference of the China Association of Work Safety, held from 24 to 26 October 2024. It was officially launched in 2025 on the SciOpen platform, with co-sponsorship by the School of Safety Science at Tsinghua University and the China Association of Work Safety. The launch coverage presented the journal as a milestone for the field: an international academic journal, in English, devoted solely to safety and emergency science, intended to build a global academic exchange platform for researchers, industry and policymakers in a domain that had previously published inside general engineering, public health and disaster journals. In its first year the journal moved quickly from announcement to a publishing record, releasing the issues of Volume 1 during 2025 — with its third issue presented by the press as its debut issue release, containing an editorial, three review articles and three research articles — and continuing into Volume 2 in 2026.

Co-founders: Tsinghua University and the China Association of Work Safety

The journal's two founding institutions pair academic and industry authority. Tsinghua University provides the scholarly base: its School of Safety Science, established in 2023, grew out of the Institute of Safety Science and Technology within the Department of Engineering Physics, and is dedicated to public safety research encompassing the scientific theory and methodology of disaster prevention, technical solutions for disaster mitigation, emergency management systems, emergency response platforms, urban safety and human protection. The school houses the Beijing Key Laboratory for Comprehensive Emergency Sciences and participates in national programmes including the Ministry of Science and Technology's public safety planning and the National Natural Science Foundation of China's major research programme on emergency management. The China Association of Work Safety, the national industry association for work safety, provides the practitioner and policy side of the partnership. Launch statements emphasised that this co-founding bridges academia, industry and policy-making — a deliberate design for a field in which research must reach regulators and operators to have effect.

Editorial leadership

The journal's editors-in-chief are Tiechui Zhao and Maohua Zhong. Zhao, president of the China Association of Work Safety, was announced as editor-in-chief at the journal's launch, giving the title leadership drawn from the very top of China's work-safety community; Zhong is associated with Tsinghua's safety science community. The editorial board is described by the founders as consisting of distinguished experts from academia, industry and related fields. In 2025–2026 the editorial office opened a global recruitment for a Young Editorial Board, inviting young scholars working on safety science, emergency management, disaster prevention and mitigation, risk assessment, safety monitoring and early warning, and emergency equipment and technology. Successful applicants receive a formal appointment letter as a Young Editorial Board Member of Safety Emergency Science, issued by the sponsoring organisations for a two-year term, with applications directed to the journal's editorial office. That recruitment — unusual in its openness for a new journal — is part of the founders' stated strategy of gathering new academic forces and building the journal's vitality and influence from its first volumes.

Scope: safety domains

The journal's published scope is broad and precisely enumerated. On the safety side it lists chemical safety, clean energy safety, fire safety, industrial chain safety, infrastructure safety, mine safety, occupational safety, ocean safety, power grid safety, space safety, transportation safety, underground safety and work safety. Launch materials expanded the same territory in fuller terms: mine safety, chemical safety, fire prevention and response, traffic safety, marine safety, power grid safety, underground space safety, occupational safety, production safety, clean energy safety, industrial chain safety, infrastructure safety and safety planning. The list is notable for what it treats as one field. Hazards that are administered by different regulators and studied in different departments — a chemical plant accident, a mine disaster, a fire in an underground station, a failure of the power grid — are gathered into a single journal on the argument that they share a science: risk arises, is monitored, is controlled, and sometimes escapes control, in recognisably similar ways across all of them.

Scope: emergency domains and interdisciplinary research

The emergency side of the scope covers accident emergency, catastrophe emergency, flood and inundation emergency, emergency evacuation, emergency response, natural disasters and international rescue, together with emergency policy and regulation and the application of artificial intelligence in safety science and engineering. The journal states that it recognises the complexity of the issues it covers and therefore particularly welcomes innovative interdisciplinary research with wide impact. Special issues announced in its first volumes illustrate the direction: one on fire safety in urban underground space, and another on applications of AI in fire safety, both with submission deadlines in 2026. The pairing of the two halves of the scope is the journal's intellectual signature. Safety science studies how accidents and disasters can be prevented; emergency science studies how their consequences can be limited once prevention fails. Safety Emergency Science is built to publish both, and the work that connects them — monitoring and early warning, risk assessment, evacuation and response planning — in a single venue.

Early published research

The research in the journal's first volume shows the scope in operation. A 2025 article proposed a probabilistic graph neural network model for predicting hydrogen explosions, enabling real-time prediction of the spatial overpressure distribution in hydrogen production plants from sparsely observed inputs, and framed as a framework for digital-twin-based emergency response systems for hydrogen explosion risk — work at the meeting point of clean energy safety and artificial intelligence. Another article, in Volume 1, Issue 3, proposed a smart control method for urban gas pipeline networks based on topological logic, addressing a key energy transmission and distribution system in China's cities. A third, early in Volume 1, introduced an adaptive path-planning model for deploying firefighting efforts in the first stages of wildfires, built on a "wildfire–environment–personnel" framework and validated on a wildfire-prone area in Foshan City. Fire risk assessment, disaster emergency planning and AI-enabled emergency technology were likewise the frontier topics highlighted in the press coverage of the journal's debut issue. The pattern is consistent: applied, method-driven research on recognisable hazards, much of it computational, aimed at prevention and response in real systems.

Publishing model and platform

Safety Emergency Science is published online, fully open access, on SciOpen, the digital publishing platform developed by Tsinghua University Press, which the journal's launch statements credited with ensuring global accessibility and seamless knowledge dissemination across international boundaries. Its articles carry DOIs in the SES series under Tsinghua University Press's 10.26599 prefix — for example, the debut issue's editorial material at 10.26599/SES.2025.9590014 — and are cited by volume, issue and article number in the form Safety Emergency Science 2025, 1(3). The journal is peer-reviewed, and its identity is anchored by its online ISSN, 3079-501X, under which its SciOpen journal homepage is found. As with other Tsinghua University Press launches, the press promoted the journal's milestones through international research-news channels, presenting its issue releases and special-issue calls to a global audience of researchers and journalists — a dissemination effort intended to establish the young title's name in a field where its founders hold senior positions.

Readership and significance

Safety Emergency Science serves safety scientists and engineers, emergency-management researchers and practitioners, fire and disaster specialists, regulators and the industries — mining, chemicals, energy, transport, construction — whose operations generate the risks the journal studies. Its significance is in its first-of-its-kind positioning. China's safety and emergency research community is large, institutionally strong and, since the creation of a national emergency-management system, strategically important; yet before 2025 it had no international English-language journal of its own. By founding one jointly — a national association and one of the country's leading universities, published by that university's press, edited by the association's president together with a Tsinghua scholar, and opened to the world through open access on SciOpen — the founders gave the field a flagship venue in a single step. Readers identifying the title should note its SES abbreviation, its co-founding by the China Association of Work Safety and Tsinghua University, and its online ISSN 3079-501X.