Soft materials span polymers, elastomers, gels, rubberlike materials, biological materials, living tissues, and more. The mechanical behavior of soft materials exhibits two features making them special. First, soft materials are strongly nonlinear, from both geometrical and physical standpoints. Second, soft materials are often active, and their mechanical behavior is affected by chemical, thermal, electromagnetic, and biological processes and vice versa. Of course, these two features of soft materials are challenging for experiments, theories, and applications.

While soft materials have gained significant interest from both scientific and technological perspectives in recent years, papers considering their mechanical behavior are scattered across general-purpose journals on engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry. Therefore, the idea behind this new journal is to give home and stage to research on mechanics of soft materials.

I hope this journal will help to shape the field of mechanics of soft materials. Theories will help experimentalists to interpret their measurements correctly and inspire design of new experiments. Experiments will prevent theorists from losing contact with reality. Applications will help to design new materials, structures, and technologies, thereby giving perspective to theories and experiments.