Safety.Science is founded on the conviction that safety is not merely a matter of compliance, indicators, or post-hoc explanations, but a fundamentally integrative challenge in socio-technical systems.
The journal exists to advance safety science as a discipline capable of:
- holding human experience, technical systems, and contextual conditions together;
- recognising early signals, ambiguities, and relational dynamics before failure;
- and supporting learning, reintegration, and design beyond blame and reductionism.
1. Safety as an integration problem
Safety.Science treats safety as a problem of integration capacity rather than information availability alone. Many failures occur not because signals were absent, but because they could not be integrated across organisational, technical, and contextual boundaries.
The journal therefore welcomes work that addresses:
- pre-failure signal distortion,
- relational and organisational dynamics,
- governance, power, and responsibility,
- system integration and reintegration,
- and design approaches that preserve meaning across system lifecycles.
2. Respect for complexity and uncertainty
We explicitly recognise that:
- safety phenomena unfold under deep uncertainty,
- failure investigations are always partial and constrained,
- and knowledge after failure is shaped by the same organisational and relational forces that existed before failure.
As such, the journal values conceptual clarity, theory-building, and reflective analysis alongside empirical and technical work.
3. Non-accusatory, non-reductive stance
Safety.Science adopts a non-moralising and non-accusatory editorial stance.
The purpose of publication is not to assign blame, but to:
- make structural, relational, and systemic vulnerabilities visible;
- understand how well-intended systems drift or distort over time;
- and support learning that increases future integration capacity.
4. Openness, responsibility, and integrity
Safety.Science is an open, independent journal. It operates transparently with respect to:
- editorial roles,
- review pathways,
- conflicts of interest,
- and publication decisions.
Editorials and conceptual papers may be editor-reviewed. Research articles and substantive theoretical contributions are normally subject to invited peer review, appropriate to the journal’s developmental phase.
5. A developing journal with explicit intent
Safety.Science is intentionally launched as a foundational and developmental journal.
Rather than claiming maturity prematurely, the journal is explicit about its phase:
- building a coherent intellectual core,
- establishing editorial principles,
- and inviting thoughtful scholars to shape its direction.
We believe credibility is built through clarity of intent, not through scale alone.