Call for Proceedings – ECCB 2016 – CALL CLOSED

Proceeding Track chair: Sanne Abeln, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

We invite the submission of full papers that demonstrate both the development of new computational techniques and their application to Molecular and Systems Biology, with significant outcomes to biomedical, agricultural, and environmental questions. Please note the deadline for submission has now passed. The call for proceedings is closed.

New for ECCB 2016 will be the organization of the conference presentations according to five main themes:

 
Authors should indicate a ranking of the preference they have for each of the five themes. The Programme Committee determines to which theme a submission will be assigned taking the author preference into consideration. The theme assigned will be used to streamline the review process and to group the conference presentations in appropriate thematic sessions.

Accepted submissions will be presented in two tracks running in parallel at the conference. All presentations should be no longer than 15 minutes and will be followed by a maximum of 3-minute discussions.

Accepted submissions will be published as conference proceedings in an open access, online-only, section of a regular issue of the Bioinformatics journal with an electronic version distributed to conference delegates. The proceedings will be available online approximately one month prior to the conference opening.

Publication of the proceedings as an online part of the Bioinformatics journal will result in fully citable articles, indexed by Medline and ISI. See the conference proceedings for ECCB 2014 for an example of online-only publication by Oxford University Press.

Taken together, the ultimate goal of the Proceeding Track is to attract exciting and ground-breaking computational developments that will both contribute to the success of the conference and to the impact the meeting has on advancing computational biology and bioinformatics.

Proceeding Track: review criteria

All submissions will be evaluated by a group of theme co-chairs and the submission will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

1. Relevance, interest, and value of the topic to conference attendees.
2. Impact of the submission on biology/medicine.
3. Scientific quality.
4. Originality (previously unpublished work). At the time of submission to ECCB 2016, and for the entire review period, the submission should not be under review by any other conference or scientific journal.
5. “Presentability” of the work to a large, diverse audience.
6. We aim to balance across the themes and may factor this into the acceptance decisions.

Given these six criteria, the ultimate decision of acceptance for a Proceeding Track submission lies with the Programme Committee.

Proceeding Track: submission guidelines

Submissions must be made to the EasyChair Proceeding Track submission site (submission closed). Submissions should include the following:

1. Name/affiliation/email of presenting author. The presenter should register for the conference.
2. Names/affiliations/email of all co-authors. Note that all co-authors have to agree to the submission. It is the responsibility of the submitter to guarantee that all co-author email addresses are correct (email notifications of the submission will be sent to all co-authors).
3. Title.
4. At least three keywords (also known as key phrases or key terms) to characterize your submission.
5. Application domain, choose one:
   • Health
   • Agro-Food
   • Biotechnology
   • Ecosystems
   • Fundamental (Fundamental/basal research with no immediate application domain)
6. Order the 5 themes below by relevancy to your paper, putting the most relevant theme on 1 and the less relevant theme on 5:
• Data: Organization, management, categorization, integration, analysis of data, knowledge discovery.
• Genome: Sequence analysis, alignment, evolution, phylogeny, genetics, epigenetics, 3D conformation.
• Genes: Expression, function, regulation, transcription, translation, geno-phenotype.
• Proteins: Structure, function, alterations, assemblies, interactions, design, proteomics.
• Systems: Systems biology, pathways, molecular networks, dynamics, signaling, multi-scale modeling.
7. 150-word description of the presentation for promotion on conference website and conference app. ^A)
8. PDF of the paper. ^B)
9. Papers can be submitted in either a template-free format or in the format following the template for author submission to the OUP journal bioinformatics.
• If the OUP template is used the paper length must not exceed nine pages.
• If the template-free format is used the length of the paper must not exceed 12 pages (single space, 12 point font), including abstract, figures, tables, and bibliography.
• In either case, the paper must contain an abstract whose length does not exceed 250 words.
10. If absolutely necessary, submissions may be accompanied by supplementary material, similar to submissions to scientific journals. The supplementary material should be collected in a separate file that is appropriately marked and uploaded as an attachment on the paper submission page in EasyChair. However, we advise against adding supplementary material, in general. ^B)
11. Note that papers should be submitted in their final form since the evaluation procedure does not allow for additional rounds of refinement / modification in response to referee criticisms.

^A) Please note there is no word count available on the EasyChair form, you can use a tool like e.g. https://wordcounter.net. Submissions that succeed the maximum number of words will not be admitted to the review procedure.
^B) Please note that only PDF submissions are acceptable. It is the responsibility of the submitter to verify that the PDF is completely viewable/printable by all major operating systems (LINUX, MacOS, Windows).

For each accepted submission a presenter must register and pay to attend and present at the conference.

For each presenting author only one submission to the Proceedings Track will be considered.

After acceptance submissions will have to be formatted according to the layout style required by the OUP bioinformatics journal and will be limited to 9 pages. Formatting requirements can be found at: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/bioinformatics/for_authors/submission_online.html.

Supplementary material will be published on the proceedings site alongside the online version of the conference paper. We do not support supplementary material presented at any other than the publisher’s site. Additionally, OUP does not edit or typeset supplementary data – it is uploaded online exactly as it is received, so authors must ensure its accuracy before submitting.

Due to the extention of submission deadlines, the notification dates for the proceedings will shift as well. Acceptance notifications will be sent no later than 30 May 2016. Final, corrected versions of accepted submissions, which must conform to the formatting guidelines available when the paper is accepted, are due no later than 13 June 2016.

Proceeding Track: review procedure

Submission will be assigned to the themes based on the authors’ indicated preference ranking of themes. To ensure a proper load balancing between themes and theme co-chairs, submissions may be moved to a theme of second (or third) choice. In case of an unexpected high number of proceedings submissions, a preselection on impact and suitability of the conference (criterion #1) based on the abstract alone may be necessary before papers are sent out for review. For each preselected submission the theme co-chairs will seek three reviewers. Based on the reviews, the theme co-chairs will rank submissions assigned to their theme. Based on the rankings for each theme, the Programme Committee together with theme co-chairs will decide on the final acceptance for each submission.

Proceeding Track: contact details

All questions pertaining to the Proceeding Track can be directed to: proceedings@eccb2016.org