Light: Science & Applications

About Light: Science & Applications

Light: Science & Applications — Journal Profile

Light: Science & Applications (commonly shortened to LSA) is a peer-reviewed, fully open-access scientific journal devoted to optics and photonics. It has been published since March 2012 by the Nature Publishing Group — today part of Springer Nature — on behalf of two Chinese partner organisations: the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Optical Society. The JournalsWorld record for this journal lists the electronic ISSN 2047-7538 and the publisher Nature Publishing Group, and those details match the journal's official bibliographic records. A print ISSN, 2095-5545, is also registered for the title, although the journal itself operates as an online publication. Its standard abbreviation is Light Sci. Appl., and its CODEN is LSAIAZ.

LSA occupies a distinctive place in the optics publishing landscape. It was created in Changchun — a city with a long institutional history in optical engineering in China — with the ambition of building an internationally visible, English-language venue for light-based science that would sit alongside the established optics journals of Europe and North America. Publishing through the Nature Portfolio infrastructure gave the new title immediate global distribution, professional production and indexing pathways, while editorial leadership remained rooted in the photonics research community. More than a decade after launch, the journal is firmly established: it is ranked in the first quartile (Q1) in its Scopus subject categories, it carries a Journal Impact Factor reported at 23.4 for 2024 in Journal Citation Reports, and it attracts submissions from leading photonics groups worldwide.

This profile explains what the journal publishes, how its editorial and peer-review model works, what it costs to publish there, how it is indexed and measured, and which authors it suits best. Every verifiable fact below is drawn from the journal's own publisher pages, its Directory of Open Access Journals and indexing records, and established bibliographic sources. Where a detail could not be verified from an official source, this profile says so plainly rather than guessing.

At a Glance

History and Institutional Background

The journal was established in March 2012. Its founding editor-in-chief was Jianlin Cao of the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, who now serves as honorary editor-in-chief. The Changchun institute — often shortened to CIOMP — is one of China's principal research centres for optics, precision mechanics and physics, and its sponsorship explains both the journal's location of origin and its early strengths in optical engineering, instrumentation and applied photonics. The Chinese Optical Society, the country's national professional society for optics, is the second sponsoring partner, giving the journal a direct connection to the wider Chinese optics community.

The decision to publish with the Nature Publishing Group was strategic. A new journal competing for the best photonics manuscripts needs more than a competent editorial office; it needs discoverability, citation indexing, production quality and the trust of authors who might otherwise send their strongest work to long-established titles. The Nature Portfolio partnership supplied that platform from the first volume. Content is published online on a rolling, weekly basis rather than being held for assembled issues, which shortens the time between acceptance and public availability — an important consideration in fast-moving areas such as integrated photonics, quantum optics and ultrafast science, where priority and rapid dissemination matter.

Editorial leadership has internationalised as the journal has grown. Bibliographic listings for 2026 name Martin Booth of the University of Oxford and Yun-Feng Xiao of Peking University as co-editors-in-chief, reflecting the journal's dual anchoring in the Chinese and international photonics communities. Underneath the editors-in-chief sits a broader editorial board of active researchers covering the journal's subject range, supported by professional publishing staff at Springer Nature who handle submission systems, production, archiving and platform delivery.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The journal's stated purpose is to promote research across all aspects of optics and photonics — basic, applied and engineering research alike. It seeks original articles and reviews that are of high quality, high interest and far-reaching consequence, with an emphasis on cutting-edge and emerging topics alongside traditional subjects in optical engineering. In practice, that scope spans a very wide territory, and understanding its internal geography helps authors judge fit.

Fundamental optics and photonics

Core physical optics remains central: wave and quantum optics, nonlinear optics, ultrafast phenomena, coherence, interference, diffraction, polarisation and the interaction of light with matter at every scale. Work on lasers and laser physics — new gain media, cavity designs, frequency conversion, pulse generation and beam control — sits naturally here, as does research on optical materials, including crystals, glasses, semiconductors, metamaterials and metasurfaces that engineer light-matter interaction in ways natural materials cannot.

Applied and engineering photonics

The "& Applications" half of the title is taken seriously. The journal publishes optical engineering and instrumentation, fibre optics and optical communications, photonic integrated circuits, sensing and metrology, imaging systems, display and lighting technology, and optoelectronic devices. Papers that connect a physical insight to a working device, a measurement capability or a manufacturable technology are characteristic of the journal, and purely incremental device reports without a clear conceptual or performance advance are a weaker fit.

Light in the life sciences and environment

Biophotonics is a recognised strand: optical imaging and microscopy for biology and medicine, biosensing, photomedicine and related techniques that use light to observe or interact with living systems. Environmental and remote-sensing applications of optics also fall within the journal's declared interests, as its indexing keywords — which include optics in life science and the environment — confirm. Interdisciplinary papers are welcome when the optics or photonics contribution is substantial and clearly articulated; a paper in which light-based measurement is merely a routine tool used in passing will usually belong in a journal of the application field instead.

Emerging frontiers

The journal explicitly positions itself toward emerging topics. Quantum photonics, topological photonics, attosecond science, terahertz technology, neuromorphic photonics, optical computing and the photonics of energy conversion are all areas where the journal has sought consequential work. Review articles that organise a rapidly developing frontier — clarifying what is established, what is contested and what should come next — form an important part of its content mix alongside original research.

Article Types and What Editors Look For

The journal publishes original research articles and reviews as its principal formats, together with shorter and commentary-style article types that appear in its fee schedule under headings such as Correspondence, Light People, News & Views and Research Highlight. The distinction matters financially as well as editorially, because the article processing charge differs by type, as explained in the fees section below.

Editorially, three tests recur in the journal's own description of what it wants: quality, interest and consequence. Quality means technically sound, well-controlled and honestly reported work. Interest means the result should matter to readers beyond the authors' immediate sub-specialty — a finding that only a handful of specialists in one narrow technique could appreciate will struggle, however competent it is. Consequence means the paper should change what other researchers think or do: a new capability, a new physical insight, a performance benchmark reset, or a synthesis that reorders a field. Authors preparing a submission should write their title, abstract and cover communication so that all three tests are easy for an editor to apply within the first few minutes of reading.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

Manuscripts are submitted through Springer Nature's online submission system, which allows authors to track status as the paper moves. Submissions first face editorial assessment: editors judge scope fit and the quality-interest-consequence tests before committing the journal's reviewer pool. Papers that pass are sent for independent peer review by subject experts; the journal describes its content as independently peer-reviewed, and reviewer reports inform an editorial decision of acceptance, revision or rejection. As with other selective Nature Portfolio titles, authors should expect that a significant share of submissions are declined at the editorial stage without external review — this is a structural feature of a high-selectivity journal, not a reflection on the basic competence of the work declined.

Because selectivity is high, the most productive author strategy is honest self-assessment before submission. Compare the manuscript against recently published LSA papers in the same sub-area: is the advance of similar magnitude? Is the evidence of similar completeness? Is the significance framed for a broad photonics readership rather than only for immediate competitors? If the answer to any of these is clearly no, a strong specialist journal is likely to give the work a better and faster home, and a rejection from LSA after external review will have cost months. If the answers are yes, LSA offers something few specialist titles can match: visibility across the whole optics community and beyond it.

Open Access, Licensing and Fees

LSA is a fully open-access journal. Every article is made freely and permanently available online immediately on publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers, and authors retain copyright in their work. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits sharing and reuse — including commercial reuse — with appropriate attribution. That licence makes the journal compliant with the open-access mandates of most major research funders, a point authors funded by national agencies and charities should confirm against their own grant conditions before submission.

Open access is funded by an article processing charge (APC) payable on acceptance; the applicable price is the one current at the date of acceptance, and VAT or local taxes may apply. The journal's published fee schedule lists a lower charge for Correspondence, Light People, News & Views and Research Highlight items — £665 / $1,000 / €755 — and a standard charge for all other article types of £2,890 / $4,290 / €3,190. These figures come from the journal's own open-access page and should be re-checked at submission time, because publishers revise APCs periodically and institutional open-access agreements may cover part or all of the charge for eligible corresponding authors. Springer Nature also operates waiver and discount policies for its fully open-access journals for authors in the lowest-income countries, with discretionary consideration in cases of financial need; applications are expected at submission stage, not after acceptance. No submission fee is charged: the APC is a publication charge triggered by acceptance, so a rejected manuscript costs the author nothing but time.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the major services for its field: Science Citation Index Expanded and the Current Contents services (Engineering, Computing & Technology; and Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences) from Clarivate; Scopus; Chemical Abstracts Service; Ei Compendex; Inspec; and EBSCO databases. It has been listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, consistent with its fully open-access model. Indexing of this breadth means LSA content is discoverable through Web of Science, Scopus and the engineering databases that optical engineers actually use, which underpins its citation performance.

On metrics, the headline figure is the Journal Impact Factor: Journal Citation Reports gives the journal a 2024 impact factor of 23.4, placing it among the highest-impact titles in optics. Scopus-based indicators tell the same story from a different data source: SCImago lists the journal with an SJR of about 5.0, an h-index in the region of 174, and Q1 rankings in both of its subject categories — Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics; and Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials. A CiteScore reported around 31.6 in recent listings reinforces the picture. Three cautions apply to all such numbers. First, metrics change every year and differ between providers because their citation databases and counting windows differ; treat any single figure as a dated snapshot and check the current release before citing it in a tenure file or grant application. Second, journal-level averages say nothing about the citation fate of an individual paper, which depends on the work itself. Third, the journal's high metrics are a consequence of its selectivity, not a substitute for it: the same editorial filtering that produces a high impact factor also produces a high rejection rate.

Who Should — and Should Not — Submit

LSA is a strong target for research groups with a result that advances optics or photonics in a way a broad readership will recognise: a first demonstration, a record performance with a clear physical explanation, a technique that opens a previously inaccessible measurement, or a review that genuinely reorganises understanding of a frontier. Groups working at the interface of photonics with biology, medicine, energy or information technology should consider it when the photonics contribution is the heart of the advance. Chinese research groups benefit from the journal's sponsoring institutions and community roots, but the journal is international in authorship and readership, and non-Chinese groups publish there routinely.

It is a weaker target for solid but incremental studies, for application reports whose novelty lies in the application rather than the optics, and for work whose natural audience is a single narrow technique community. Such papers are not lesser science; they are simply matched to the wrong venue, and routing them to a respected specialist journal from the outset will usually produce a faster decision, more expert reviewers and a readership that values the contribution at its true worth.

Practical Submission Notes

Before submitting, read the journal's current Guide for Authors on its Nature Portfolio pages and follow its formatting, reporting and data-availability requirements exactly; selective journals return non-compliant manuscripts without review. Prepare a concise cover letter that states the advance, its evidence and its consequence for the wider field in plain terms. Declare competing interests and funding sources as the publisher requires, credit authorship according to contribution, and be ready to share the data underlying the paper in line with Springer Nature's research-data policies. If your institution holds a Springer Nature open-access agreement, verify eligibility before acceptance so the APC is routed correctly; if you intend to request a waiver or discount, raise it at submission, as the publisher states that later requests cannot be considered. Finally, confirm the current APC on the journal's open-access page on the day you submit, since the figures quoted in this profile are a snapshot from the publisher's published schedule and will eventually be superseded.

Verification Notes and Limitations

The core identity of this record is secure: the electronic ISSN 2047-7538, the Nature Publishing Group publisher credit and the United Kingdom country listing on the JournalsWorld record all match the journal's official and indexing records. Two details deserve a clarifying note rather than a correction. First, the journal also carries a registered print ISSN, 2095-5545, even though it publishes online; directories that list a single ISSN normally show the electronic one. Second, editorial leadership titles change over time: Jianlin Cao is the founding editor-in-chief and is now described as honorary editor-in-chief, while current listings name Martin Booth and Yun-Feng Xiao as co-editors-in-chief; authors should confirm the masthead on the journal site when it matters, for example when addressing a cover letter. No Impact Factor, APC or indexing claim in this profile should be treated as permanent: all are time-stamped facts that the publisher and the indexing services revise on their own cycles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Light: Science & Applications open access?

Yes. It is a fully open-access journal. All content is free to read immediately on publication, authors retain copyright, and articles appear under a CC BY licence. The model is funded by an article processing charge paid on acceptance.

What is the journal's ISSN?

The electronic ISSN is 2047-7538, which is the ISSN shown on the JournalsWorld record. A print ISSN, 2095-5545, is also registered for the title.

Who publishes the journal?

The Nature Publishing Group, part of Springer Nature, publishes it on behalf of the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Optical Society.

What does it cost to publish?

On the publisher's published schedule, the APC is £2,890 / $4,290 / €3,190 for standard article types, and £665 / $1,000 / €755 for Correspondence, Light People, News & Views and Research Highlight items, plus any applicable taxes. Institutional agreements may cover the charge, and waiver policies exist for eligible authors. Always confirm the current figure on the journal's open-access page before submitting.

What is the journal's impact factor?

Journal Citation Reports reports a 2024 impact factor of 23.4. Scopus-based sources place it in Q1 in both of its categories with an SJR of about 5.0. Metrics are revised annually, so check the latest release for any formal use.

When was the journal founded, and by whom?

It was established in March 2012, sponsored by the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics and the Chinese Optical Society, with Jianlin Cao as founding editor-in-chief.

Conclusion

Light: Science & Applications is one of the clearest examples of a regionally sponsored journal achieving genuinely global standing: Chinese institutional backing, Nature Portfolio publishing infrastructure, an international editorial leadership and readership, Q1 rankings, and a 2024 impact factor of 23.4. For photonics researchers, it belongs on the short list of aspirational venues — provided the manuscript can pass its three tests of quality, broad interest and far-reaching consequence. Authors who judge that fit honestly, prepare the submission to the journal's exact requirements, and budget for the open-access charge will find in LSA a fast, visible and prestigious home for their best light-based science.