Plasma Research Express

About Plasma Research Express

Plasma Research Express: Journal Profile

Plasma Research Express (often shortened to PREX) was a broad, multidisciplinary plasma-science journal published by IOP Publishing Ltd in the United Kingdom under the online ISSN 2516-1067. Launched after an announcement in May 2018 and publishing its first volumes from 2019, the journal set out to serve the whole plasma community in one venue: fundamental, engineering and applied plasma science, at both low and high temperatures. It is equally important to state the end of the story at the outset. IOP Publishing announced that Plasma Research Express would cease publication at the end of 2022 and that it closed to new submissions on 29 July 2022, because the journal had not built a large enough body of content to remain sustainable as a publishing option for the community. Everything published in the journal remains freely readable in perpetuity through the IOPscience archive, and the content has also been preserved with the CLOCKSS and Portico preservation services. This profile therefore describes a complete, closed journal run — 2019 to 2022 in the coverage recorded for this record — rather than a venue that is currently receiving manuscripts, and readers should treat any submission guidance below as the journal's historical model, not as an invitation to submit today.

Why the Journal Was Created

When IOP Publishing introduced Plasma Research Express in May 2018, it presented the journal as a response to the way plasma research had spread across neighbouring disciplines. Plasma work no longer sat only inside physics departments. The same underlying science — ionised gases, discharges, plasma-surface interactions — was being used by materials scientists growing thin films, by engineers building plasma sources for industry, by chemists driving reactions, by biomedical researchers exploring cold atmospheric plasma treatments, and by astrophysicists interpreting turbulence and instabilities in space. IOP already published established plasma titles, including Plasma Sources Science and Technology and Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, but those journals carried more specialised or more demanding significance thresholds. PREX was designed to complement them with breadth and speed: a journal that would judge work primarily on scientific rigour rather than on perceived impact or novelty, and that would turn manuscripts around quickly.

The founding Editor-in-Chief, Professor Hae June Lee of Pusan National University in the Republic of Korea, framed the ambition plainly at launch: the journal was aimed at all plasma scientists in all parts of the world, and its multidisciplinary coverage was meant to reflect the complete breadth of how plasma research intersects with physics, astrophysics, materials science, chemistry, the biomedical sciences and engineering. That framing matters for understanding the archive today. A reader browsing PREX volumes will find fusion-oriented high-temperature plasma papers shelved beside low-temperature plasma medicine, plasma processing and plasma diagnostics — a breadth that was deliberate, not accidental.

Scope in Detail

IOP's own description of the journal defines its scope as new experimental and theoretical research covering all areas of fundamental, engineering and applied plasma science at low and high temperatures, with a transparent editorial process focused on the scientific rigour of the work rather than its perceived impact or novelty, article-length flexibility, and a fast-track peer-review process. The topic list the publisher gave for the journal is the most reliable map of what the journal actually welcomed, and it is worth working through in full because each line corresponds to a recognisable community within plasma science.

Interdisciplinary plasma applications

The first topic area named plasma science and technology for interdisciplinary applications: materials science, nanotechnology, micro-optics, medicine and biology, chemistry and processing, and environmental technology. This is the low-temperature, applications-facing side of the field — plasma etching and deposition, plasma treatment of surfaces and liquids, plasma-assisted chemical conversion, and the rapidly growing biomedical literature on cold atmospheric plasmas interacting with tissue, cells and microorganisms.

High-temperature plasmas and controlled fusion

At the opposite end of the temperature range, the journal covered high-temperature plasmas and controlled fusion. Papers in this strand dealt with magnetically confined plasmas, heating and fuelling, stability, and the physics base for fusion devices — work that overlaps with, but is broader and more rigour-focused than, the highly demanding fusion journals in the same publisher's portfolio.

Laser-plasma and high energy density science

Laser-plasma interaction, high energy density plasma science and warm dense matter formed a further strand. These topics connect plasma physics to intense-laser facilities, inertial confinement research, laboratory astrophysics and the physics of matter at extreme pressures and temperatures.

Diagnostics, modelling and data

The journal explicitly welcomed plasma diagnostics, plasma instrumentation and facilities; plasma modelling and simulations; and, notably, data-driven plasma science. The inclusion of a data-driven strand signalled an openness to machine-learning and data-intensive approaches at a time when those methods were only beginning to spread through the field. Fundamental principles and data for plasma-surface interactions, electromagnetic interactions of charged particles and beams, nonlinear phenomena in natural and laboratory plasmas, instabilities and turbulence in astrophysical and space plasmas, and design rules and operating mechanisms for industrial plasma sources rounded out the list. Taken together, the scope statement describes a journal that wanted the mechanisms as much as the applications: contributions were expected to report the underlying physics and its wider implications through the viewpoint of plasma science.

Article Types

Plasma Research Express published four article types. Research papers were articles of unlimited length reporting new research — the length flexibility was a deliberate part of the journal's design, allowing authors to include the full methodological and supporting detail that tighter formats often force into supplements or omit entirely. Technical notes were brief, methods-based articles of a more technical nature that made a useful and novel addition to the literature — the natural home for a new diagnostic arrangement, a source modification or a measurement technique. Topical reviews presented a snapshot of recent progress in a particular field. Tutorials provided background knowledge for readers unfamiliar with a subject, aimed at early-career researchers or at experienced researchers moving into a new area, and were written to be more didactic than a standard review. For authors choosing a format during the journal's active years, the practical lesson was that completeness was not penalised: a long, fully documented research paper was as welcome as a short one, provided the science was sound.

Peer Review and Editorial Model

The journal's peer-review arrangements were unusual in one respect that received considerable attention at launch: authors could choose between single-anonymous and double-anonymous review when submitting. In the terminology IOP published for the journal, identity transparency was listed as single-anonymous or double-anonymous at the author's choice, with reviewers interacting with the editor rather than directly with authors. The process was managed by IOP Publishing's in-house peer-review team working closely with the editorial board, and the publisher committed to rapid first decisions, with accepted articles made accessible within 24 hours of acceptance carrying a citable DOI. The journal also operated a transfer route: manuscripts submitted to another IOP Publishing journal that did not fit that journal's scope or significance criteria could be transferred to PREX together with their peer-review reports, saving authors and reviewers duplicated effort, and PREX itself could offer onward transfer when a manuscript was not accepted there. Plasma Research Express stated that it maintained high standards of publication and research ethics and was a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), with authors and reviewers expected to comply with IOP Publishing's ethical policy. The journal had also adopted IOP Publishing's research data policy, under which authors were asked to check that their article complied before submission and could include research data as supplemental files.

Open Access, Charges and the Archive

During its publication life, Plasma Research Express was a hybrid open access journal. Publishing on a subscription-access basis was free of charge; there were no submission charges and no other publishing charges. Authors who wanted their article to appear as gold open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence could pay an article publication charge, which IOP listed for this journal at £1,970, €2,235 or US$2,645 excluding VAT where applicable, with discounted charges for eligible authors from many lower- and middle-income countries and coverage through IOP's transformative agreements at participating institutions. Authors who did not take the gold option could use a green open access route instead. Those figures are now historical — the journal no longer accepts submissions — but they remain useful to readers reconstructing the conditions under which the archive was produced, and to librarians reconciling past invoices and agreement reports.

The closure arrangements are the part of the journal's record that matters most today. IOP stated that all previously published content in Plasma Research Express would be made freely available for perpetuity through the journal's IOPscience home from the beginning of 2023, and that all articles had additionally been preserved with CLOCKSS and Portico, the widely used third-party preservation services that protect the integrity of the scientific record. In practice this means the distinction between articles originally published behind the subscription wall and articles published gold open access no longer governs ordinary reading access to the archive: the whole run can be read freely, while the preservation deposits guard against the archive ever disappearing from its primary platform.

Indexing and Bibliometric Picture

IOP listed the journal's abstracting and indexing services as Scopus, Chemical Abstracts Service, CNKI, Inspec, J-Gate, JST, the NASA Astrophysics Data System and Naver Academic — a spread consistent with its intended readership across physics, chemistry, engineering and space science. The journal does not appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals search results for its ISSN, which is consistent with its hybrid (rather than fully open access) model, so no DOAJ listing is claimed in this profile.

For scale, the OpenAlex source record resolved from ISSN 2516-1067 (OpenAlex source S4210220108) records 166 works and 1,144 citations for the journal, with a summary h-index of 15. The Journals World record previously carried an h-index of 14, a small difference of the kind that routinely arises between bibliometric databases with different coverage and update cycles; readers comparing figures should always name the database. What those numbers show, whichever source is used, is a small journal: fewer than two hundred articles across four publication years. That small corpus is precisely the reason IOP gave for closure — high-quality content, but not enough of it to sustain the journal — and it also explains why individual PREX papers can be comparatively visible: a compact archive in a well-indexed publisher platform, now freely readable, continues to attract citations after closure.

How to Read and Cite the Archive

Because Plasma Research Express is closed, the useful guidance for researchers today concerns reading, citing and building on its archive rather than submitting to it. Citations should use the journal's standard abbreviation and its online ISSN 2516-1067 where a source identifier is needed, and should link to the article's DOI on IOPscience, where the publisher maintains the version of record. Authors whose plasma manuscripts might once have been directed to PREX should instead consider the continuing IOP plasma titles that the publisher itself named in its closure notice — Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion and Plasma Sources Science and Technology — or other plasma venues, checking each journal's current scope and significance expectations, since those differ from PREX's rigour-first model. Reviewers and editors studying editorial practice may still find PREX instructive: its author-choice anonymity model, its explicit rigour-over-novelty criterion and its unlimited-length research papers were genuine experiments in journal design, and the closure notice is a candid public record of the volume threshold a community journal needs to survive.

Plasma Research Express Among IOP's Plasma Journals

Understanding where PREX sat inside its publisher's portfolio helps readers interpret the archive and helps authors redirect work that would once have gone there. IOP Publishing's plasma list has long been anchored by Plasma Sources Science and Technology, a demanding journal focused on the science and technology of plasma sources, and by Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, which serves the magnetic-confinement fusion community. Alongside them stand broader physics titles that regularly carry plasma papers, such as Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Nuclear Fusion (published by IOP on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency) and New Journal of Physics. PREX was deliberately positioned differently from all of these: broader than the specialist titles, faster than the general ones, and — most distinctively — committed to judging submissions on rigour rather than on an editor's forecast of impact. That positioning filled a real gap. A carefully executed study with a null or incremental result, a replication, a thorough parametric scan, or a methods paper of mainly technical value could be excellent science yet struggle at a journal whose threshold was framed in terms of significance; at PREX, soundness was the stated test, with article-length flexibility so that the evidence for that soundness could be presented in full.

The transfer system connected these titles into a single ecosystem. A manuscript declined by a sister journal on scope or significance grounds could move to PREX with its reviews intact, which reduced wasted reviewer effort across the community and gave authors a dignified, quick second chance inside the same publishing house. In the closure notice, IOP pointed authors back in the opposite direction, naming Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion and Plasma Sources Science and Technology as the established journals through which it would continue to serve the plasma community. Researchers citing PREX papers in new work will often find the natural continuation of a PREX research line in one of those titles.

Legacy and Lessons of a Short Run

A four-year run is short in journal terms, and PREX's history is a useful case study in the economics of community journals. The publisher's closure statement was unusually transparent: the journal had published high-quality content, but not a large enough body of it to ensure longer-term sustainability. Several features of the journal that authors valued — an unhurried attitude to article length, a rigour-first threshold, transfer intake from sister journals — did not by themselves generate the submission volume a standalone title needs. At the same time, the closure was handled in a way that protected the scholarly record: a clear final submission date announced months ahead, completion of the 2022 volume, free perpetual access to the whole archive from the start of 2023, and preservation deposits with CLOCKSS and Portico. For librarians and bibliometricians, the journal therefore remains a clean, bounded dataset — a complete title with a single ISSN, a defined start and end, and a stable archive address — rather than the ambiguous, half-migrated remnant that less careful closures can leave behind. For the plasma community, the articles themselves remain part of the working literature: diagnostics methods, source designs, modelling studies and application results published in PREX continue to be read and cited, and their free availability since closure can only widen that readership.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Plasma Research Express still accepting submissions? No. The journal closed to new submissions on 29 July 2022 and ceased publication at the end of 2022.

Can I still read articles published in Plasma Research Express? Yes. IOP Publishing made all previously published content freely readable in perpetuity through IOPscience from the beginning of 2023, with preservation copies held by CLOCKSS and Portico.

What is the ISSN of Plasma Research Express? The online ISSN is 2516-1067.

Who published Plasma Research Express? IOP Publishing Ltd, in the United Kingdom. The founding Editor-in-Chief was Professor Hae June Lee of Pusan National University.

What subjects did the journal cover? All areas of fundamental, engineering and applied plasma science at low and high temperatures, including fusion, laser-plasma and high energy density science, diagnostics, modelling, data-driven plasma science, plasma-surface interactions, space and astrophysical plasmas, and interdisciplinary applications in materials, medicine, chemistry and environmental technology.

Was Plasma Research Express open access? It was a hybrid journal: subscription publication was free of charge, and authors could pay an article publication charge for gold open access under a CC BY licence. Since closure, the full archive is freely readable regardless of the original route.

How large was the journal? OpenAlex records 166 works and 1,144 citations under its ISSN, with a summary h-index of 15; the small size of the corpus was the publisher's stated reason for discontinuing the title.

Profile compiled from IOP Publishing's official journal pages and closure notice, the publisher's launch announcement, and the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 2516-1067. Figures are attributed to their sources in the text; the journal's closure status is stated as announced by its publisher.