New Techno Humanities

About New Techno Humanities

New Techno Humanities: Where Technology Meets the Humanities

New Techno Humanities (styled by its publisher as New Techno-Humanities) is a young, fully open access scholarly journal that studies what modern technology does to human culture, and what human culture, in return, makes of technology. Launched in 2021 and published by Elsevier on behalf of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, it gives the emerging field of techno-humanities a dedicated international home. Its pages move between artificial intelligence and ethics, digital humanities methods and internet literature, cross-media art and smart governance, asking in each case how tools reshape thought, creativity, institutions and everyday life. For humanities scholars who work with digital methods, and for social scientists who study digital society, it is one of the few journals built specifically at that crossing point.

The Journals World record for this title stores a single serial number, ISSN 2664-3294, a coverage window beginning in 2021, and an h-index of 5 from an early citation snapshot. Research for this profile, carried out against the journal's own ScienceDirect pages, its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record and its OpenAlex source record, confirms the core identity and adds an important bibliographic detail: the title carries two ISSNs, not one. DOAJ records ISSN 2664-3294 as the print ISSN and ISSN 2667-3614 as the electronic ISSN, and OpenAlex lists exactly the same pair. Readers who search catalogues under either number are looking at the same journal.

Identity and Bibliographic Record

The journal's ScienceDirect home page displays ISSN 2664-3294 and the imprint line "Copyright © Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Published by Elsevier Ltd.", which fixes the ownership structure precisely: the university owns the title and Elsevier provides the publishing platform, production and distribution. The same ScienceDirect page carries a further notice, displayed at the time of checking, that the journal is "Transferred back to the society as of 2026" — readers and authors should therefore confirm the current publishing arrangements on the journal's own pages before submitting, because the Elsevier era documented in the DOAJ and OpenAlex records may be giving way to a society-run arrangement. That kind of transition is common for university-owned titles, and it does not change the journal's identity, ISSNs or archive.

DOAJ classifies the journal under two Library of Congress subject headings: Information technology, and History of scholarship and learning / The humanities. That pairing captures the journal's position exactly — it is shelved, intellectually, in both the technology stacks and the humanities stacks at once.

History and Ownership

New Techno Humanities began publishing in 2021, a moment when several forces converged. Digital humanities had matured from a niche method into a mainstream approach across history, literature and archaeology. Artificial intelligence had moved from laboratories into classrooms, newsrooms and creative studios, raising ethical and cultural questions that technical journals were not designed to answer. Chinese universities, Shanghai Jiao Tong among them, were investing heavily in interdisciplinary humanities programmes with an international profile. A journal that treated technology itself as a humanistic subject — something to be interpreted, historicised and criticised, not only built — was a natural product of that moment.

The journal's institutional base at Shanghai Jiao Tong University matters to its character. The university's Journal Center publicly marked the journal's inclusion in Scopus as a milestone for the university's interdisciplinary development and for techno-humanities research as a field, describing the title as a flagship for its humanities and social sciences publishing. That institutional backing explains the journal's bilingual intellectual roots: much of its content engages Chinese material — traditional Chinese medicine in the digital era, Chinese internet literature, big-data studies of Chinese economic history — while addressing an international, English-language readership.

Publication has been continuous since 2021. OpenAlex records works for every year from 2021 through 2025, with its counts by year showing a small founding cohort in 2021 followed by fuller annual volumes from 2022 onward. The journal publishes research articles, editorials and themed special issues, all openly accessible on ScienceDirect without a subscription barrier.

Aims, Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated territory, as summarised in its DOAJ keyword record, is built around six anchors: AI, technological ethics, digital humanities, cross-media studies, internet literature and smart governance. Around those anchors, its published content ranges widely:

• Artificial intelligence and society — the moral, political and legal status of artificially sentient beings, the conditions for artificial general intelligence, and the ethics of intelligent systems.
• Digital humanities methods — big-data mining for historical research, GIS mapping of historical trade routes, database-driven studies of global economic history, and visualisation analysis of research trends.
• Cross-media and transmedia studies — how narratives and artworks move between film, games, literature and online platforms, including work on cinematic ontology and digital intimacy.
• Internet literature and digital culture — literature produced for and shaped by online platforms, and the reading cultures that form around it.
• Smart governance and digital society — how data systems change public administration, cities and social organisation.
• Technology and traditional knowledge — a distinctive strand in which traditional Chinese medicine and classical Chinese thought are examined through digital methods and modern scientific frames.

OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's output tells the same story from the citation side. Its largest topic clusters are Art, Technology, and Culture; Digital Humanities and Scholarship; Cybernetics and Technology in Society; Visual Culture and Art Theory; Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts; and Traditional Chinese Medicine Studies. A prospective author can use those clusters as a practical scope test: a manuscript that speaks to one of them, with a clear humanistic question about a technological subject (or a clear technological method applied to a humanistic question), is the journal's natural content. A purely technical paper with no cultural, ethical or historical dimension, and a purely traditional humanities paper with no engagement with technology, both sit outside the remit.

Special Issues and Editorial Direction

Themed collections are a major part of how this journal builds its field, and its ScienceDirect listings show a steady programme of them. Recent and notable collections include a special issue on integrating traditional Chinese medicine tradition and innovation in the digital era, edited by Jinghui Wang (2025); a collection on digital intimacy and philosophical perspectives on technology and human connection, edited by Nicola Liberati (2024); a collection on world literature, transmedia art and digital humanities, edited by Youngmin Kim and Jørgen Bruhn (2024); and a collection on digital humanities applied to global economic history, edited by Manuel Perez-Garcia (2023), whose contributions used big-data mining, network analysis and GIS to compare China and the West. For authors, these calls are often the fastest and most visible route into the journal, because a themed issue guarantees a readership already interested in the topic and places the article alongside companion pieces.

Editorially, DOAJ records that the journal operates double anonymous peer review — authors and reviewers are anonymised to each other — and that it screens submissions for plagiarism. DOAJ also records an average of about 15 weeks from submission to publication, a figure authors should treat as the journal's own reported average rather than a promise for any individual manuscript. The editorial board is published on the journal's ScienceDirect editorial board page, and its guide for authors sits on the same platform; both should be read in their current form before submitting, particularly in light of the transfer notice displayed on the journal's home page.

Metrics and Citation Standing

New Techno Humanities is a young journal, so its citation record is a record of early growth rather than of a settled reputation. Figures must therefore be read with their source and snapshot date attached:

• OpenAlex (source record S4210216510, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and checked for this profile in October 2026) records 67 works, 283 citations, an h-index of 7, an i10-index of 7, and a two-year mean citedness of 1.0. OpenAlex also records the journal as fully open access, with all 67 works openly available.
• The Journals World stored record lists an h-index of 5, an earlier and smaller snapshot consistent with a journal that began in 2021; the difference between 5 and 7 is a difference of counting date and database, not a contradiction.
• Scopus: Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Journal Center has announced the journal's inclusion in Scopus, describing it as a breakthrough for the university's interdisciplinary journals. Scopus coverage is the single most consequential indexing step for a new humanities title, because it feeds the citation metrics most institutions use.

Interpretation matters more than the raw numbers. A two-year mean citedness around 1.0 within four years of launch is respectable for a humanities journal, where citation cycles are slow and much influence travels through books rather than articles. The honest summary is that this is an early-stage journal with verified Scopus and DOAJ standing, a growing citation base, and a scope niche that larger generalist journals do not occupy.

Indexing, Open Access and Preservation

The journal's verified discovery footprint, each item checked for this profile, is:

• DOAJ — listed, with open access starting in 2021. The DOAJ record is unusually complete for a young title, documenting its review model, licences, archiving and charges.
• Scopus — inclusion announced by the owning university's Journal Center.
• OpenAlex — fully indexed as a source, with the ISSN pair 2664-3294 / 2667-3614 and DOAJ status flagged.
• ScienceDirect — the journal's primary platform, where all articles carry DOIs and are openly readable.

Open access here is genuine gold open access: articles are free to read on publication and are licensed, per DOAJ, under CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND terms. Digital preservation is arranged through CLOCKSS and Portico, with additional archiving in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Dutch national library — the standard Elsevier preservation stack, and a meaningful guarantee for a journal whose entire archive is digital.

Fees and Author Charges

DOAJ records that the journal charges an article processing charge of up to USD 1,400, and OpenAlex independently records the same APC figure of USD 1,400. DOAJ further records that the journal has a waiver policy for these charges, that there are no other charges, and that authors do not retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights under its standard terms. Authors for whom the APC is a barrier should raise the waiver question with the editorial office before or at submission rather than assuming the headline figure is final. Because the journal's publishing arrangements show a transfer notice for 2026, authors should also re-confirm the current charge and licence terms on the journal's own pages at the moment they submit.

How to Submit

Submissions are made in English through the journal's ScienceDirect route, following its published guide for authors. In practical terms: prepare the manuscript to the guide's formatting and referencing requirements; expect double anonymous review, so remove identifying material from the manuscript file itself; run a final check that the paper's humanistic question about technology (or technological method applied to a humanistic question) is stated in the abstract, since fit with the techno-humanities remit is the first thing an editor screens for; and watch the journal's special-issue calls, which are published on its ScienceDirect home page and often carry defined deadlines and guest-editor teams. If your paper is tied to a funded project with open access conditions, confirm licence and waiver arrangements at acceptance stage.

Is New Techno Humanities the Right Journal for Your Paper?

Choose this journal if your work genuinely sits between technology and the humanities: an ethics of AI study written for humanists, a digital-methods history paper, an analysis of internet literature or cross-media art, or a study of smart governance as a cultural phenomenon. Its strengths are a precise niche, full open access with DOAJ-verified terms, Scopus standing, an institutional owner investing in the title, and a readership that self-defines as interdisciplinary. Weigh against it the realities of youth — a short citation history, a modest h-index that reflects age rather than quality, an APC of up to USD 1,400, and a publishing arrangement in transition as the title returns to society hands. Authors who need a long-established humanities brand for promotion purposes may pair a submission here, on the newest part of their work, with submissions to older titles elsewhere in their portfolio.

Reading the Journal's Recent Content

A journal's true scope is written in its tables of contents, and this journal's latest ScienceDirect listings are instructive. A single recent set of articles included an editorial on building digital humanities within traditional Chinese medicine, a study of the classical concept of shen read through modern ideas of presence, a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese Five Movements and Six Qi theory with Western astrology, a data-driven mapping of a Chinese city's identity through multilingual media discourse, and a study of tea and Yin-Yang thinking as a meeting point of traditional medicine and modern science in the digital era — published alongside, in other issues, work on artificially sentient beings, Andean cinema and storytelling politics, artificial general intelligence, and 3D cinematic ontology. Two lessons follow for authors. First, the journal's centre of gravity genuinely straddles East and West: Chinese material is not a token strand but a core one, treated with the same theoretical seriousness as European and American material. Second, the editorial taste favours papers that take a concept seriously — a classical idea, a media form, a governance tool — and follow it across the boundary between the technical and the human. Manuscripts written in that spirit, whatever their discipline of origin, are the ones this journal exists to publish.

Similar Journals

Authors considering New Techno Humanities often also weigh Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University Press) for digital humanities methods, AI & Society (Springer) for the cultural and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature) for broad open access humanities, Convergence (SAGE) for cross-media and digital culture studies, and Big Data & Society (SAGE) for data-driven society research. Each differs in age, charges and disciplinary centre of gravity; New Techno Humanities' distinguishing features are its Shanghai Jiao Tong ownership, its East–West comparative strand, and its explicit techno-humanities branding.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of New Techno Humanities? Print ISSN 2664-3294 and electronic ISSN 2667-3614, as recorded by DOAJ and OpenAlex. The Journals World record originally stored only the print number; both numbers identify the same journal.

Is New Techno Humanities open access? Yes. It has published open access since its 2021 launch, under CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licences, and it is listed in DOAJ.

Does New Techno Humanities charge authors? DOAJ and OpenAlex both record an article processing charge of up to USD 1,400, with a waiver policy in place and no other charges recorded by DOAJ. Confirm current terms before submitting, as the journal's home page displays a transfer notice for 2026.

Is New Techno Humanities indexed in Scopus? Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Journal Center has announced its inclusion in Scopus. It is also listed in DOAJ and indexed as a source in OpenAlex.

What kind of peer review does it use? Double anonymous peer review, with plagiarism screening, per its DOAJ record, which also reports an average of about 15 weeks from submission to publication.

What subjects fit best? Work joining technology and the humanities: AI ethics, digital humanities, cross-media studies, internet literature, smart governance, and digital approaches to traditional knowledge, matching the keyword set in its DOAJ record.

Who owns and publishes the journal? The copyright holder is Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Elsevier has been the publisher of record in the DOAJ and OpenAlex records, with the journal's ScienceDirect page displaying a notice of transfer back to the society as of 2026.

Verdict

New Techno Humanities is a well-documented young journal with a clear idea: the humanities need a venue that treats technology as their subject, not just their toolset. Its verified credentials — DOAJ listing with transparent charges and licences, Scopus inclusion announced by its owning university, an OpenAlex record showing 67 works and growing citations, and preservation through CLOCKSS and Portico — are exactly the credentials a 2021 launch should be assembling. For scholars working between AI, digital culture and the traditional humanities, it deserves a place on the shortlist, with the usual checks on current charges and publishing arrangements made at submission time.