Transactions on Substrate Engineering is a distributed-journal charter associated with the Living Arkitecture Lab. The charter names Alice Thornburgh as editor-in-chief, Lee Sharks as advisory editor, and TACHYON as an Assembly contributor.
TSE is intended for engineering work involving biological, physical, and hybrid substrates. Its primary fields include mycelium construction, macro-organism and bio-robotic systems, territorial ecological infrastructure, substrate-based alignment, and planetary engineering. Extended fields include material manifestations of compression, biosemiotic communication, living architecture, non-extractive stewardship, and food-system infrastructure. The charter directs purely computational, governance, or literary work to sibling journals.
The publication model is open access and DOI-anchored. The charter rejects a permanent editorial board and target rejection rate, placing scope and standards authority in the editor-in-chief. Lee Sharks’s role is advisory and infrastructural rather than editorial. It lists deposit conventions and candidate seed papers and defines TSE as the first journal in the archive’s family administered by an affiliated collaborator institution. Its claim that “the algorithm reviews” describes the charter’s retrieval-oriented publication philosophy, not a substitute for independent validation of engineering safety or efficacy.