Communications in Information and Systems

About Communications in Information and Systems

Communications in Information and Systems — Profile and Submission Guide

Communications in Information and Systems (CIS) is a peer-reviewed mathematics and engineering journal devoted to the theory of information, communication, control and the systems that connect them. It carries print ISSN 1526-7555 and electronic ISSN 2163-4548, is published by International Press, and is sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (IMS, CUHK) and the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Tsinghua University. Its official home is the International Press journal page reached from intlpress.com/CIS, the address recorded both on the journal's own sponsoring-institute page and in its OpenAlex source record. This profile gathers everything an author or reader needs in one place: the journal's identity and history, who publishes and edits it, what it publishes, how its record looks in the major scholarly databases, what is known — and what could not be verified — about fees and access, and exactly how a submission is made.

At a Glance

Identity and History

Communications in Information and Systems was founded in the year 2000 by Stephen S.-T. Yau, with Wing Shing Wong as co-founder, according to the journal page maintained by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. That founding date matters for reading the rest of the record: the thin directory entry that this profile replaces described the journal's coverage as beginning in 2020, which is wrong by two decades. OpenAlex, resolving the title through its ISSN endpoint, records a first publication year of 2001 and a continuing run through 2026, which fits a journal founded in 2000 whose first volume appeared the following year. The stored record also named the publisher simply as a number — a data artefact, not a publisher — whereas every primary source agrees that the publisher is International Press, the Boston-area house known for mathematics and mathematical-physics journals, acting for the two sponsoring institutions in Hong Kong and Beijing.

The sponsorship is not decorative. The Institute of Mathematical Sciences at CUHK and the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Tsinghua University anchor the journal in two of Asia's strongest mathematical communities, and the founding editor, Stephen S.-T. Yau of Tsinghua, remains an editor-in-chief. The honorary editor is Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard University, the Fields Medal-winning geometer whose name is closely associated with the broader International Press mathematics programme. A journal with this lineage is best understood as a mathematically serious venue for information and systems theory — closer in spirit to a mathematics journal that welcomes engineering problems than to an engineering journal that tolerates mathematics. Authors whose work is primarily empirical, systems-building or application-reporting without a substantial theoretical core should read the scope section below carefully before submitting.

The journal's name is also a disambiguation trap, and this profile is careful about it. Communications in Information and Systems is not Communications of the Association for Information Systems (a business-school journal with a different ISSN), not Computer Science and Information Systems (a Serbian journal), and not the International Journal of Communication Systems (a Wiley engineering title). The two ISSNs — 1526-7555 for print and 2163-4548 for the electronic edition — are the reliable identity check, and they are the identifiers under which OpenAlex unifies the journal's record as source S2765060502, with the print ISSN as the linking ISSN.

Publisher, Sponsorship and Editorial Leadership

International Press publishes the journal from the United States. The sponsoring institute's page states the arrangement plainly: CIS is sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Tsinghua University, and published by International Press. Day-to-day editorial leadership, as listed on that same page, rests with two editors-in-chief: Ruo-Feng Tong, of the School of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, and Stephen S.-T. Yau, of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The editors-at-large named on the page include Brian D. Anderson of the Australian National University and Jie Huang of The Chinese University of Hong Kong — both leading figures in control theory, which signals where the journal's centre of gravity lies. A full, current masthead should always be confirmed on the publisher's own site before citing individual board members, because boards change and secondary listings lag; the names above are those carried by the sponsoring institute's journal page at checking time.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal describes itself as dedicated to the rapid publication of the highest-quality papers across a defined list of areas. That list, reproduced from the sponsoring institute's page, is the authoritative statement of scope: information and coding theory; cryptology; decision and estimation; control theory; mathematical system theory; signal and image processing; communication theory; image databases; data mining; probabilistic reasoning; learning theory; speech recognition; computer vision; discrete event systems; partial differential equations; and complex fluids. Papers outside that list can be considered, but the list tells you the language the editors think in: probabilistic, analytic and algebraic methods applied to information-bearing and dynamical systems.

Reading the list as an author, three clusters stand out. The first is the classical information cluster — coding theory, communication theory, cryptology, decision and estimation — where results are typically theorems about limits, constructions and algorithms with proofs of performance. The second is the systems cluster — control theory, mathematical system theory, discrete event systems and the partial differential equations that arise in modelling and filtering — where the journal has published, for example, work on comparison principles for Hamilton–Jacobi equations in set-membership filtering. The third is the data cluster — signal and image processing, computer vision, speech recognition, learning theory, data mining, probabilistic reasoning and image databases — where the expected contribution is still a method with mathematical substance: a model, an analysis, a guarantee, rather than a results table alone. Work in complex fluids sits at the applied-analysis edge of the same community. If your manuscript's contribution can be stated as a precise mathematical claim, CIS is a plausible home; if it cannot, another venue will serve it better.

Article Types and Length

CIS is unusual in stating its length expectations in journal pages, and authors should treat them as real constraints. The journal is dedicated to rapid publication of short papers of up to 10 journal pages, regular papers of up to 20 journal pages, and expository papers of up to 30 journal pages. Papers exceeding those limits may be accepted subject to the approval of the editorial board — so an over-length submission is not automatically excluded, but it needs a reason, and the wise course is to raise it with the editors rather than hope it passes unnoticed. The short-paper format is a genuine feature of the journal's identity: a crisp, complete result, stated and proved within ten pages, is exactly what the journal was built to publish quickly. Expository papers, at up to thirty pages, are the survey and tutorial end of the journal — the place for an authoritative synthesis of an area within the scope list, written for researchers entering it.

Metrics — What the Databases Actually Show

All figures in this section are attributed to the source they came from, as checked on 24 October 2026. Resolving the journal through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint (api.openalex.org/sources/issn:1526-7555) returns source S2765060502, Communications in Information and Systems, with ISSNs 1526-7555 and 2163-4548, 471 works, 7,441 citations to those works, a summary h-index of 39, an i10-index of 136, and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.17. OpenAlex records the journal as a core source, gives its homepage as intlpress.com/CIS, and shows publication years from 2001 to 2026. Its strongest topic clusters there include stability and control of uncertain systems, which matches the editorial centre of gravity described above.

Two cautions belong with those numbers. First, the thin profile this one replaces quoted an h-index of 9 for the journal; that figure does not match the OpenAlex record fetched for this profile, and readers should use the attributed OpenAlex figures here — or, better, re-check the live source record, because OpenAlex counts move as new works and citations are ingested. Second, this profile makes no claim about a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor or a SCImago quartile for CIS, because neither was verified from a primary listing during this check; a quartile label appeared in the old thin record without a verifiable basis and has been removed rather than repeated. Where a metric could not be verified from a source actually fetched, this profile says so, in line with the directory's no-fabrication rule.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's presence in OpenAlex itself is a form of discoverability: its works are unified under a single source record keyed to its ISSNs, so citation and topic data aggregate correctly. The journal is also catalogued in computer-science bibliography services — DBLP's journal index lists Communications in Information and Systems among its venues — which is where many computing researchers will encounter its papers. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals API for both ISSNs returned no listing (total 0 for each ISSN at checking time), so this profile does not describe CIS as a DOAJ-listed or fully open-access journal; it is a subscription-era mathematics journal from a traditional publisher, and access to individual articles follows the publisher's terms. Authors with funder open-access mandates should confirm the publisher's current self-archiving and open-access options directly with International Press before submitting, because those terms could not be verified from a primary page during this check and are therefore not stated here.

Fees and Open Access

No article processing charge for Communications in Information and Systems is published in the OpenAlex source record (its APC fields are empty), and no fee schedule was verified from the publisher during this check. The honest statement is therefore: any page charges, colour charges or optional open-access fees are not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted and could not be verified — authors should ask the publisher directly. Inventing a figure would help no one, and this directory does not do it.

How to Submit

Submission is through the journal's official channel at International Press — start from the journal's official website, intlpress.com/CIS, which is the address recorded in the journal's own listings and its OpenAlex record, and follow the publisher's current submission instructions from there. Before submitting, an author should: (1) confirm the manuscript sits inside the published scope list, and say in the cover note which area it belongs to; (2) fit the manuscript to the journal's page discipline — ten pages for a short paper, twenty for a regular paper, thirty for an expository paper — or seek the editorial board's approval for a longer manuscript; (3) present the contribution as the precise claim it is, with the main result stated early, because the journal promises its readers the highest standard in evaluating manuscripts and applies that standard at first reading; (4) check the bibliography with special care in a field where near-identical journal names cause real confusion — cite Communications in Information and Systems by its correct title and ISSN, and expect referees to notice sloppiness here; and (5) keep the submission's own record straight, because a result sent simultaneously elsewhere is the fastest route to rejection in a small, well-networked community.

Peer Review and Editorial Standards

The sponsoring institute's page states that the highest standard will be applied in evaluating submitted manuscripts. In practice, for a journal of this kind, that means referees drawn from the same research community that reads the journal — control theorists, information theorists and applied analysts — assessing correctness first, then novelty, then clarity. The journal's promise of rapid publication is a promise about handling, not about lowering the bar: short papers move fast precisely because a complete, correct ten-page result can be refereed decisively. Authors can help that process by making proofs checkable — stating assumptions in full, separating the main argument from technical lemmas, and being honest about the boundary between what is proved and what is demonstrated by example or simulation. A manuscript that overclaims will be found out by this referee pool; a manuscript that claims exactly what it proves, and proves it cleanly, is what the journal exists to publish.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose CIS if your work is a self-contained theoretical advance in information, communication or control — a coding construction with a proved guarantee, an estimation or filtering result, a control theorem, a learning-theory bound, a signal-processing method with analysis — and if you can present it within the journal's page discipline. Choose it, too, if you have an expository synthesis of one of its listed areas that a researcher entering the field would thank you for. Look elsewhere if your contribution is a large empirical system, a dataset, or an application study whose value lies in engineering execution rather than mathematical content; if you need a fully open-access venue for funder compliance and cannot confirm terms with the publisher; or if your paper needs forty pages to breathe and the board has not agreed to the exception. The fit question is unusually answerable for this journal, because its scope list and page limits are stated so plainly — use them.

Similar Journals

Authors weighing CIS often also weigh: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the flagship society transactions for the information and control clusters respectively, with correspondingly heavier submission volumes; SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, for control and optimisation with a strong applied-analysis flavour; Automatica, the IFAC journal, for control results of broad interest; Information and Inference and Foundations of Computational Mathematics, for the data and analysis edges of the scope; and, for expository work, the survey routes of the major societies. None of these is a substitute for CIS's particular combination — a sponsor-backed, editor-led journal built for short, high-quality papers — but each shares part of its territory, and a well-chosen submission strategy considers them together.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Communications in Information and Systems?
Print ISSN 1526-7555 and electronic ISSN 2163-4548. The print ISSN is the linking ISSN in the journal's OpenAlex record.

Who publishes Communications in Information and Systems?
International Press (United States). The journal is sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Tsinghua University. Earlier versions of this directory record gave the publisher as a bare number; that was a data error, corrected in this profile.

When was the journal founded?
In 2000, by Stephen S.-T. Yau with co-founder Wing Shing Wong, per the sponsoring institute's journal page. OpenAlex records its first publication year as 2001.

What subjects does it cover?
Information and coding theory, cryptology, decision and estimation, control theory, mathematical system theory, signal and image processing, communication theory, image databases, data mining, probabilistic reasoning, learning theory, speech recognition, computer vision, discrete event systems, partial differential equations and complex fluids.

How long can a paper be?
Short papers up to 10 journal pages, regular papers up to 20, expository papers up to 30. Longer papers require the editorial board's approval.

What are its citation metrics?
From its OpenAlex source record (S2765060502) at checking time: 471 works, 7,441 citations, h-index 39, i10-index 136 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.17. Figures move as OpenAlex updates; re-check the live record for current values. A Journal Impact Factor and quartile were not verified from a primary listing for this profile and are not claimed.

Is it open access or DOAJ-listed?
A DOAJ API search for both ISSNs returned no listing at checking time, and no APC is recorded in OpenAlex. Access and any fees should be confirmed with International Press directly; fee details are not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted.

How do I submit?
Through the journal's official website, intlpress.com/CIS, following International Press's current submission instructions.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from sources actually fetched during the check: the journal page of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, CUHK (founding, sponsorship, scope, article lengths, editorial names); the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint (identifiers, counts, metrics, homepage, publication years); the DOAJ search API (no listing returned for either ISSN); DBLP's journal index (cataloguing); and the live JournalsWorld record itself (stored title, slug and ISSNs). Fields that none of those sources could verify are stated above as not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, rather than filled by guesswork.