Procedia Materials Science

About Procedia Materials Science

Procedia Materials Science: Profile and Guide

Procedia Materials Science was an Elsevier open-access proceedings serial that published peer-reviewed conference papers in materials science, technology and engineering under electronic ISSN 2211-8128. It was not a conventional research journal that accepted individual manuscripts from any author at any time. Instead, Elsevier worked with conference organisers: the papers of a specific conference, summer school or symposium were collected, reviewed through that event’s processes, and issued together as a volume of the Procedia title on ScienceDirect. ScienceDirect now states plainly that the title was discontinued as of 2017, and Elsevier’s own shop page states that Procedia Materials Science is not accepting new publication proposals, directing organisers instead to Materials Today: Proceedings. The complete archive remains openly readable on ScienceDirect, and it is large, varied and still frequently cited — which is why understanding exactly what kind of publication it was matters for anyone citing it, evaluating it, or considering a proceedings outlet for a new conference.

This profile explains the Procedia model, the history and end of the title, the kinds of conferences and topics it carried, its publisher and ISSN, its open-access and indexing position, how its peer review differed from a standard journal, who should use the archive, and what conference organisers and authors should do today now that the title is closed. It also flags the most common misunderstandings: treating a Procedia volume as a regular journal issue, quoting a journal impact factor for it, or sending an individual paper to a title that never accepted individual submissions and no longer accepts proposals at all.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Procedia Materials Science
• Publication type: Open-access conference proceedings serial (Elsevier Procedia model)
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 2211-8128 (electronic)
• Platform: ScienceDirect
• Access model: Open access — articles shown on ScienceDirect as open access research articles
• Status: Discontinued as of 2017 (ScienceDirect); not accepting new publication proposals (Elsevier Shop)
• Successor route named by Elsevier: Materials Today: Proceedings, for conference proceedings in materials science, technology and engineering
• Article DOI pattern in the archive: 10.1016/j.mspro…
• Submission route while active: Conference proposals from organisers only — no individual author submissions

What the Procedia Model Was

Elsevier’s Procedia family applied a single idea across many fields — Procedia titles existed for engineering, computer science, energy, social sciences and other areas. A conference organiser proposed a proceedings volume; if Elsevier accepted the proposal, the event’s papers were published together as a named volume of the relevant Procedia title, hosted on ScienceDirect, given DOIs, and made openly accessible. The volume retained the identity of the event: ScienceDirect presents each volume under the conference name, such as the 20th European Conference on Fracture, the 8th International Conference on Porous Metals and Metallic Foams, or the 2nd International Summer School on Nuclear Glass Wasteform, all within the Procedia Materials Science archive under ISSN 2211-8128.

This model served two needs at once. Conference organisers gained a fast, visible, permanently hosted proceedings with the production quality and discoverability of ScienceDirect, without setting up their own publishing operation. Authors gained a citable, open-access record of a conference paper that libraries and search engines could find long after the event’s own website disappeared. In return, the content was proceedings content: typically shorter, more focused papers reporting work presented at the event, ranging from full research studies to progress reports, case studies and reviews tied to the conference theme.

Because volumes were event-based, the title had no regular issue rhythm of its own, no standing table of contents of commissioned research in the journal sense, and no general call for papers. A researcher could not decide, independently of any conference, to “submit to Procedia Materials Science”. The path to publication always ran through a participating conference: submit to the event, be accepted, present or register as required by the organiser, and have the paper included in the proceedings volume under the organiser’s agreement with Elsevier.

History and Discontinuation

Procedia Materials Science published volumes through the first half of the 2010s, covering conferences held around the world. The archive on ScienceDirect shows volumes devoted to fracture and structural integrity, porous metals and metallic foams, nuclear wasteform science, materials structure and micromechanics, and many other specialist meetings. A late volume from 2016, for example, collected papers on the evaluation of reactor pressure vessel steels, small punch testing, corrosion fatigue proposals for nuclear power plants and related structural integrity work — a good illustration of how the title served established engineering conference series whose communities needed a reliable proceedings record.

ScienceDirect marks the title “discontinued as of 2017”. Elsevier’s shop page for ISSN 2211-8128 adds the practical consequence: “Procedia Materials Science is not accepting new publication proposals”, and it names the alternative explicitly — proposals are welcome in Materials Today: Proceedings, described by Elsevier as a premier publication outlet for conference proceedings in materials science, technology and engineering, with proposals handled through the Materials Today route. Organisers reading older web pages that still describe Procedia Materials Science as an active option should follow the current Elsevier guidance, not the archived descriptions. The archive itself remains live and openly accessible; discontinuation ended new volumes, not access to existing ones.

The closure fits a wider consolidation in Elsevier’s proceedings publishing, in which the Materials Today family became the named home for materials conference proceedings. For bibliographic purposes the important points are stable: papers published in Procedia Materials Science keep their volume, pages, DOI and open-access status; the title’s ISSN remains 2211-8128; and no new volume after the discontinuation should be expected or trusted if a third-party site claims to offer one.

Scope: Conferences and Topics in the Archive

The subject scope was materials science in the broad engineering sense: the structure, properties, processing and performance of materials, and the mechanics of how materials behave in service. Because each volume mirrored a conference, the archive reads as a map of the materials conference landscape of its years. Fracture mechanics and structural integrity form a major strand, anchored by the European Conference on Fracture volumes, with papers on fatigue, crack growth, failure analysis and the mechanical behaviour of metals, alloys, rocks and engineered structures. Porous metals and metallic foams form another, with work on syntactic foams, collision energy absorption and phase change materials combined with metal foams. Nuclear materials form a third visible strand, through volumes on nuclear glass wasteforms — radiation and thermal ageing of waste glasses, radiation damage studied by spectroscopic techniques, gas solubility in oxide glasses — and through the 2016 structural integrity material on reactor pressure vessel steels.

Beyond those anchors, volumes covered the standard breadth of the discipline as conferences presented it: metallurgy and alloy behaviour, ceramics and glasses, polymers and composites, nanomaterials, surface and coating behaviour, corrosion, welding and joining, materials characterisation by microscopy and spectroscopy, and computational modelling of microstructure and mechanical response. The common thread was not a single subfield but a format — peer-reviewed papers from a defined scientific meeting, published promptly and openly.

Readers using the archive today should read each paper in that context. A Procedia paper is a conference paper: it may be an early account of work later developed into a longer journal article, a self-contained study sized for a proceedings, or a community progress report whose main audience attended the event. None of that diminishes its citability, but it does affect how a careful reader weighs it — check whether the same authors published an extended journal version, cite the version you actually used, and avoid double-counting the conference and journal versions as two independent results in a review or meta-analysis.

Publisher, Production and Open Access

Elsevier published the title and hosts the archive on ScienceDirect, where each volume page carries the standard “About this publication” statement giving ISSN 2211-8128 and Elsevier’s copyright notice. Production followed Elsevier’s proceedings workflow: organisers supplied the accepted papers in the required format, Elsevier produced the uniform ScienceDirect presentation with article-level DOIs in the 10.1016/j.mspro series, and the volume was released as open access so that any reader could open the PDFs without a subscription. Open access is a defining feature of the archive’s continuing usefulness: a paper from a 2013 or 2016 conference remains as easy to retrieve today as a current journal article, which is rarely true of proceedings published only on a conference website or in a print volume.

While the title was active, the commercial arrangement sat with the conference, not with the individual reader, and Elsevier’s proposal process — described on its shop and proceedings pages — was the gate. That is why the shop page’s current wording matters more than any general description: proposals are closed for this title, and Elsevier directs organisers to Materials Today: Proceedings and its proposal application for new events. Individual authors were never the customer for a Procedia volume, and no legitimate fee is payable by an individual author to place a single paper into Procedia Materials Science today.

Peer Review and Quality Considerations

Peer review in the Procedia model was organised through the conference. Organisers and their programme committees handled submission, review and selection for their event, and Elsevier’s proceedings framework expected organisers to apply peer review to the papers in their volume. The practical consequence is that review depth could vary between events, as it does across conferences generally: a long-running series with an international programme committee, such as the European Conference on Fracture, brought established review practices, while a small workshop volume reflected its own committee’s standards. A responsible evaluation of a specific Procedia paper therefore looks at the event as well as the text — the standing of the conference series, the organiser and institution, and the paper’s own methods and data — rather than assuming a single journal-wide review standard or, equally, dismissing proceedings papers as unreviewed.

Indexing followed the same logic. Proceedings volumes on ScienceDirect were discoverable through the major scholarly search systems, and conference papers of this kind are commonly covered by engineering and citation databases that index proceedings, such as Scopus and Web of Science conference proceedings coverage, depending on the event and year. Because coverage decisions are made per title and per event by each database, a reader who needs to prove indexing for a specific paper should verify that paper’s record in the database in question instead of relying on a general claim about the title. Similarly, no Journal Impact Factor belongs to this title: it was a proceedings serial, and any website assigning it a current journal impact factor is misdescribing it. Where evaluation systems count proceedings papers, they do so as conference publications, and presenting them accurately in that category protects both authors and evaluators.

Who Should Use This Archive, and How

Materials researchers will find the archive most useful for conference-stage results, specialist community data, and topics that conferences cover before journals do: early fracture and fatigue data, niche foam and glass studies, and structural integrity work tied to specific plant and code questions. When you find a relevant Procedia paper, follow its references forward and backward — check the authors’ later journal publications for extended versions, and check the conference series’ later proceedings, which after 2017 will be found in successor outlets rather than in this title.

Conference organisers should use this profile as a routing guide. If you are planning a materials conference and want an Elsevier proceedings, the live route named by Elsevier is Materials Today: Proceedings: review its proposal information on the Materials Today site and Elsevier’s shop guidance, and contact the publisher through that channel. Do not announce Procedia Materials Science as your proceedings outlet for a new event, do not collect fees from authors on that basis, and correct any legacy text on your conference website that still names it — announcing a discontinued outlet creates real harm when authors plan submissions and payments around it.

Authors with a paper in the archive should keep their records precise: full author list, paper title, conference name, Procedia Materials Science volume and page range, year, and DOI. That combination resolves uniquely in ScienceDirect and in citation databases, and it distinguishes your proceedings paper cleanly from any later journal version. Librarians resolving citations should search ScienceDirect by DOI first and by title second, and should treat the conference name as part of the volume identity, since ScienceDirect presents volumes under their event titles.

Warnings: Closed Titles and Third-Party Claims

Discontinued publisher titles attract misleading third-party activity. A website offering to publish a new paper in Procedia Materials Science, to sell a slot in a forthcoming volume, or to charge an individual author for inclusion is not describing a service Elsevier offers: Elsevier’s own page says the title accepts no new proposals. Decline such offers, do not send manuscripts or payments, and if you organise a conference, warn your authors explicitly, because proceedings scams commonly target conference mailing lists. The genuine checks take minutes: the title’s ScienceDirect page shows its discontinued status, and the Elsevier shop page for ISSN 2211-8128 shows the closed proposal status and the Materials Today: Proceedings alternative.

Readers should apply the same verification habit to bibliographic details copied from secondary sites. Volume numbers, page ranges and DOIs in the 10.1016/j.mspro series can be confirmed on ScienceDirect in seconds, and the version on ScienceDirect is the version of record. If a citation you were given does not resolve there, treat the citation — not the archive — as suspect.

How the Archive Is Organised on ScienceDirect

Understanding the archive’s organisation helps a reader navigate it efficiently. ScienceDirect presents Procedia Materials Science as a single title with ISSN 2211-8128, under which each conference forms its own volume, identified by the event’s name and year rather than by a theme chosen by an editor. Within a volume, papers appear in the order of the conference programme or subject grouping used by the organisers, each with its own page range and DOI in the 10.1016/j.mspro series, its own author list and affiliations, and an open-access PDF. There is no cumulative author or subject index produced by the title itself; discovery runs through ScienceDirect search, through general scholarly search engines that crawl the open archive, and through the citation databases that indexed individual volumes. A practical search strategy is therefore to search by topic plus a distinctive term from the community you care about — a conference name, a method, a material system — and then to move sideways from a good hit: papers in the same volume share the event’s theme, and papers by the same authors in later years reveal whether the work matured into a journal article or a further conference contribution in a successor outlet. Saving the DOI of every paper you rely on, at the moment you find it, prevents the most common later problem with proceedings literature, which is a citation copied from a programme or a slide deck that cannot be resolved. If a reference you hold lacks a DOI, search ScienceDirect by the exact paper title first, then by title keywords plus the conference name; the open archive makes verification fast, and a reference that still cannot be found there should be treated as a reference to a different publication — perhaps the conference’s own abstract book — rather than to this title.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Procedia Materials Science a journal? It is best described as an open-access proceedings serial. It carried an ISSN and journal-style volumes on ScienceDirect, but its content came exclusively from conferences through organiser proposals, not from individual journal submissions.

What is its ISSN? 2211-8128, the electronic ISSN shown on ScienceDirect volume pages and on Elsevier’s shop page.

Is it still active? No. ScienceDirect states the title was discontinued as of 2017, and Elsevier states it is not accepting new publication proposals.

Where should a new materials conference publish its proceedings? Elsevier directs organisers to Materials Today: Proceedings. Review its current proposal process before announcing any outlet to your authors.

Can I still read and cite the archive? Yes. The volumes remain on ScienceDirect as open access, with article DOIs in the 10.1016/j.mspro series. Cite the paper with its volume, pages, year and DOI.

Did it have an impact factor? No journal impact factor should be quoted for this proceedings serial. Evaluate specific papers by their event, methods and citation record, and verify any indexing claim per paper in the relevant database.

Were papers peer reviewed? Review was organised through each conference’s programme process under Elsevier’s proceedings framework, so practice varied by event. Assess the conference’s standing alongside the paper itself.

Someone offered to publish my paper in a new volume. Is that legitimate? No. With proposals closed and the title discontinued, such an offer cannot be an Elsevier offer. Do not pay or submit; verify status on ScienceDirect and Elsevier’s shop page.

Summary

Procedia Materials Science, Elsevier’s open-access proceedings serial under ISSN 2211-8128, gave materials conferences of the 2010s a durable, discoverable home on ScienceDirect, publishing event volumes from fracture mechanics, porous metals, nuclear wasteforms and structural integrity communities among many others. Discontinued as of 2017 and closed to new proposals, it survives as a fully open archive that remains worth searching and citing — accurately, as conference proceedings. Organisers planning new events should follow Elsevier’s current direction to Materials Today: Proceedings, authors should cite their Procedia papers with full volume and DOI details, and everyone should treat claims of new volumes in this title as a signal to verify, not to pay.