Content

 As an indispensable basic element for the civilization and development of the economy, copper-based new materials are of strategic importance required for scientific and technological advances, leading to the development of strategic emerging industries such as electronics, aerospace, high-end equipment manufacturing, renewable energy and biomedicine. It is of great significance to carry out comprehensively the basic and applied research on new copper-based materials in an all-round manner, for the purpose of promoting the innovation and integrated development of advanced technologies in copper-related fields, adapt to emerging cross-field disciplines and talent training, enhancing international academic influence, and facilitating international scientific and technological exchanges and cooperation. It is therefore urgent to establish a scientific journal focusing on the development of science and technology for both traditional and emerging engineering applications in copper-related fields. With this aspiration, the Nonferrous Metals Society of China, Jiangxi Copper Co., Ltd.—one of the world's top 500 enterprises and the top runner in the field of copper, and Youke Publishing Co., Ltd. proposed to establish a cutting-edge interdisciplinary scientific and technological journal, cMat. In cooperation with a well-known publisher, John Wiley & Sons, the journal is committed to providing a professional academic platform for international scholars to timely disseminate their research outcomes in related fields.

     The “c” of cMat represents the frontier of crossing fields related to copper, chemistry, composite, catalyst, cycle, conduction, cell, chip, carbon, coating, and associated new materials as shown in Figure 1. cMat, to the world's scientific and technological frontier, to the main economic prospects and to the major global needs, focuses on all aspects of materials, including metallurgy, minerals, geology, chemistry and other fields related to the research of copper, gold, rare earth, silver, lead, zinc, tungsten and rare metals. Its critical focus area is the innovative development of cutting-edge science and technology in the applied fields of mining, milling, metallurgy and intelligent materials. The topics covered range from metaverse, artificial intelligence, data mining, modelling and process simulation, to the latest scientific breakthroughs and applications of copper-based advanced materials in aerospace (such as superalloys), energy (such as catalysts in energy conversion and storage), nanotechnology (such as nanomaterials), biomedicine (such as antimicrobial agents), electronics (such as superconductors and semiconductors), supramolecular chemistry (such as Cu ions as ligands), etc. The journal takes a flexible approach in terms of article types, including not only reviews and full-length research articles, but also editorials, comments on hot topics, letters, perspectives, highlights, and News&Views. cMat is designed to become a top domestic and international first-class scientific and technical journal in copper-related fields. The stakeholder of the journal is committed to creating a cutting-edge, open and innovative academic platform for integrating science and engineering, publishing timely research discoveries, and new insights for researchers from universities, research institutions, and frontline R&D laboratories.

Figure 1 The coverage of cMat

   

    cMat has attracted a group of internationally renowned scientists working in a variety of areas, including materials science and engineering (metallurgy included), physics, chemistry, electronics, etc., and assembled a professional editorial board to help guide and promote the development of the journal. Forty-two members of international universities and research institutions from 16 countries joined the editorial board, including China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, France, Sweden, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, India, Thailand, etc.

    The elite editorial team with their diverse insights and expertise will provide efficient peer-review services and post-acceptance processes to our authors, and present our readers with the most important, in-depth, and frontier basic and applied research achievements. Of critical importance to us, I am sure also to you, the reader, is to provide a rapid turnaround time from submission to publication. We are committed to this goal.

    We sincerely look forward to engaging you as readers, contributors, reviewers, and/or commenters to establish this journal. Special thanks go to our Editorial Board and to all the cMat staffs for their engagement and commitment to this effort, and to you, the readers and contributors, for your invaluable contributions and support. We are excited to grow in this effort with you together and welcome your ideas, feedbacks, and contributions as we move forward. And we believe that cMat will become one of the global leading international publishing platforms in the interdisciplinary areas of copper-related fields by providing information on the most important advances in this critical field to a broader group of researchers and engineers from both academic and industry backgrounds.