Springer Nature Launches Advanced Metamaterials, a New Open Access Journal

Springer Nature has announced the launch of Advanced Metamaterials, a new open access journal dedicated to a field its founding editor describes as expanding at unprecedented speed. The announcement, published on 7 August 2025 as the first article of the journal’s inaugural volume, comes from Chris D. Geddes, who also founded the journal Plasmonics two decades ago. According to the editorial, the new journal will primarily publish open access articles on the medical, life science, and sensing applications of metamaterials, a deliberate focus that distinguishes it from existing publications centered on mechanical properties.

Metamaterials are artificial materials not found in nature, engineered to manipulate electromagnetic radiation and acoustic waves and to enhance the mechanical properties of materials. What makes them remarkable is that their unusual behavior arises not from the inherent characteristics of their constituent substances but from the way those substances are organized into structured building blocks. Crucially, these building block elements are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation the material interacts with, a design principle that allows the assembled structure to interact with light and sound in ways conventional materials cannot.

The practical capabilities described in the editorial illustrate why the field has attracted growing attention. Metamaterials designed for electromagnetic radiation can bend light in non-conventional ways, a phenomenon known as negative refraction. They can absorb all electromagnetic radiation hitting the material, and they can improve optical high-resolution imaging. On the electronics and optics side, applications are appearing with rapidly growing use in advanced communications. Acoustic metamaterials, meanwhile, are finding roles in sound isolation and proofing as well as vibrational dampening, and mechanical metamaterials are being applied in energy and solar harvesting technologies.

Geddes attributes the current acceleration of the field to a convergence of technological capabilities that simply did not exist a decade ago. Although metamaterials have been known for well over ten years, designing and fabricating them was once far more difficult. The onset of high-end supercomputing, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the ability to nanofabricate materials much more easily have together produced what the editorial calls an explosion of metamaterials-based research at both universities and industrial laboratories. Applications, the editorial notes, are starting to rapidly expand, particularly for materials and life science applications.

The parallel with plasmonics is central to the editor’s rationale for the new journal. In 2005, Geddes founded the journal Plasmonics at a time when papers on the topic were scattered throughout the optics and physical chemistry literature, with no dedicated home. Twenty years later, he reports, Plasmonics is a leading journal in its field, holding a 2025 impact factor of 4.3, and the plasmonics research field has grown vast, with research conducted and commercial plasmonic-based products available around the world. Many competing journals emerged in the years after the original launch, a pattern he suggests may repeat for metamaterials.

In an analogous manner to what he observed for plasmonics two decades ago, Geddes writes that the community is currently seeing the breakout of metamaterials-based research around the world. The editorial frames the new journal as a response to this growing need, assembled with the help of an energetic and diverse editorial board brought together with colleagues at Springer Nature. Regional editors and the full board are credited with agreeing to serve and help the journal grow.

The scope of the new journal is explicitly defined. While some existing journals concentrate on the mechanical properties aspects of metamaterials, Advanced Metamaterials will primarily publish open access articles related to the medical, life science, and sensing applications of the technology. The editorial also states that the full aims and scope, including how the journal will consider AI-generated data, are available at the journal’s aims and scope page on the Springer Link platform, signaling that the treatment of AI-derived research data has been addressed at the policy level from the outset.

The launch editorial itself carries the hallmarks of a new publishing venture: it is classified as an Editorial, it is fully open access, and it appears as Volume 1, article number 1 of the journal, published on 7 August 2025. The piece closes with acknowledgments to the Springer Nature editorial team, naming Joshua Bayliss, Lauren Ellwood, Judith Gonzales, Christian Kohl, and Emily Hall for their help in launching the journal. For researchers working at the intersection of engineered materials, biology, and sensing, the arrival of a dedicated venue marks a formal recognition that metamaterials have moved from a niche curiosity to a discipline with its own rapidly growing literature.

Subject of Research: Launch of the open access journal Advanced Metamaterials for metamaterials research in medicine, life sciences, and sensing

Article Title: Advanced Metamaterials—a new journal for a rapidly growing discipline

Article References: Geddes, C. D. (2025). Advanced Metamaterials—a new journal for a rapidly growing discipline. Advanced Metamaterials, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44468-025-00002-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44468-025-00002-0

Keywords: metamaterials, Advanced Metamaterials journal, Springer Nature, open access, negative refraction, acoustic metamaterials, plasmonics, nanofabrication, artificial intelligence, sensing applications, electromagnetic radiation, Chris D. Geddes