From the perspective of structuration theory, youth-friendly academic journals are conceptualized as platforms that facilitate sustained engagement and profound interactions between the academic practices of early-career researchers and the structural factors inherent to academic publishing. These journals aim to seamlessly integrate their institutional objectives with the imperative of nurturing emerging scholars, thereby establishing a mutually beneficial relationship that drives collaborative progress. Through their reciprocal influence, both entities foster the advancement and prosperity of the academic community. These journals exhibit distinctive characteristics across four dimensions: subjectivity (empowering youth through epistemic agency), communicability (ensuring information transparency and responsive feedback mechanisms, and facilitating the flow of academic information), participatory capacity (creating engagement mechanisms to empower youth development), and sustainability (maintaining academic reputation and building scholarly communities). At the practical level, constructing youth-friendly academic journals requires comprehensive exploration of four strategic domains: (1) Strengthening Institutional Safeguards by enhancing national policy frameworks and optimizing journal evaluation systems to incentivize youth-inclusive practices. (2) Deepening Resource Integration by consolidating journal resources to establish supportive ecosystems for youth development. By aggregating resources to involve early-career researchers in journal operations, this approach alleviates human resource shortages while establishing replicable routine academic sharing mechanisms through resource collaboration. Concurrently, the further development and implementation of these resources—particularly through AI technologies—enable the creation of intelligent academic service platforms designed to systematically support the professional growth of emerging researchers. (3) Elevating Dissemination Efficacy: Cultivating a youth-friendly discourse environment requires building an open, respectful, and inclusive journal culture. This includes leveraging digital technologies and multimodal communication strategies to amplify the visibility and impact of early-career researchers' work, such as AI-driven content recommendation systems and interactive knowledge dissemination networks. (4) Expanding International Exchanges and Cooperation to Build a Long-term Collaborative "Youth-Journal" Academic Community. Regarding enhancing the review standards of academic journals, valuable insights can be learned from the relatively strict and fair peer-review systems and workflow processes of international academic journals. Regarding cultivating academic ethics among early-career researchers, it is essential to explore an academic ethics cultivation system that aligns with international practices and highlights Chinese characteristics. This transformation paradigm shifts journals from "output repositories" to dynamic "growth platforms," where institutional sustainability and early-career researchers' professional maturation become mutually reinforcing processes. By aligning journal operations with early-career researchers' development paths, a virtuous cycle emerges: journals gain vitality through the infusion of innovative scholarship, while early-career researchers acquire enhanced visibility and disciplinary impact through institutional support. Ultimately, the strategic convergence of journal development priorities and youth empowerment initiatives serves as a critical driver for sustained academic innovation, fostering collective progress in scholarly disciplines and the broader intellectual commons.