Publication history & masthead

The timeline

• 2008Foundation

  +Plastic Electronics launches

  Smithers Apex publishes the first magazine dedicated to the business of organic, printed and flexible electronics — "the first magazine to explore business opportunities created by new organic and printed electronic technologies." Coverage begins with OLED lighting, printed transistor backplanes, conductive ink chemistry and the first roll-to-roll pilot lines.

• 2009–13The pilot-line years

  The LOPE-C era

  The magazine becomes the journal of record for the industry's optimism phase: giant-area printing demonstrations, organic memory, e-reader backplanes and the annual Frankfurt-floor debate about when (never "whether") printed electronics reaches display-grade volumes. +PE reporting from this era is cited in academic work from Goldsmiths' wearable research to NASA technical reports.

• 2014–18Consolidation

  Reality sets in

  The optimism deflates; the industry consolidates. +Plastic Electronics tracks the survivors — the sensor webs, the e-label trials, the medical patches quietly shipping — while the trade-press ecosystem around it thins. In depth: Truly smart textiles (2010), the Mi-Mu electronic gloves cover cited in NASA's wearable-interface research (2015), printed-sensor reviews across the decade.

• 2019Pause

  The print edition ceases

  The magazine's final archived issues appear in 2019 as Smithers Apex consolidates its titles; plusplasticelectronics.com goes quiet. The domain later lapses — and is recovered by the current owners in 2026, with the explicit intent of continuing the title's editorial mission rather than exploiting its history.

• 2026Relaunch

  Vol. 18 begins

  +Plastic Electronics returns as an independent digital publication, publishing from New Delhi and Barcelona with a desk of three editors. Editorial standards and the corrections record are published from day one (read the policy). The archive of the 2008–2019 era remains accessible via the Wayback Machine; we link rather than republish, and we make no claim to continuity of ownership or staff with the Smithers Apex era.

The masthead

• Arjun Mehta — Senior Editor, Displays & Asia (New Delhi)
• Dr Elena Sørensen — Senior Editor, Materials & Manufacturing
• Miguel Fuentes — Staff Writer, Sensors & Devices (Barcelona)

Editorial correspondence: newsroom@plusplasticelectronics.com. Corrections: corrections@plusplasticelectronics.com. Full contact routes on the contact page.

A note on the archive

Readers researching the 2008–2019 era should know that we regard that archive as the historical record of a different editorial operation, run by Smithers Apex. We cite it with attribution when our reporting touches that period, we do not republish it as our own, and we do not present the relaunched publication as a continuation of that company's ownership. What continues is the title, the mission and the readership — and, we intend, the standard of straight reporting on this industry.