Scientific Communication calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Abstracts: American Society of Human Genetics 62nd Annual Meeting

Tuesday, November 6 through Saturday, November 10, 2012 San Francisco, California

The receipt deadline for new abstract submission is June 4, 2012 at 8:00 pm (US EDT).

The world's top scientists and clinicians in the human genetics field will gather to present their latest research findings at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), which will be held on November 6-10, 2012, in San Francisco, CA (http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting). ASHG is the primary professional membership organization for human genetics specialists worldwide, representing nearly 8,000 researchers, academicians, clinicians, genetic counselors, nurses, and others with a special interest in this area (http://www.ashg.org).

The ASHG Annual Meeting continues to be the largest human genetics meeting in the world, attracting more than 7,000 scientific participants each year. The ASHG 2012 Meeting will provide attendees with the latest information about cutting-edge developments in human genetics and genomics research. In addition, nearly 250 U.S. and international exhibitors at this year's ASHG Exhibitor Trade Show will offer an unprecedented opportunity to view the latest advances in genetics-related products and services derived, in part, from work presented at previous ASHG meetings.

Topics to be addressed in the scientific program for the ASHG 2012 Meeting will include: gene discovery in human genetics; new insights and challenges from next generation sequencing; advances in medical genetics and translation/applications in clinical care; progress in gene therapy; personalized medicine; cancer genetics; advances in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis; revelations about human alleles from studies of model organisms; implications of population genetic studies; modeling in statistical genetics; data centralization and its implications for our field; ethical, legal and social implications of genomics; changes in genetics education; and much more.

For more information about the ASHG 2012 Annual Meeting, or to register and/or submit an abstract for presentation at this year’s meeting, please go to: http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting.

Call for Papers and Apps: 2012 VIVO Conference

August 22 - 24, 2012 Miami, Florida

Who should attend?

Scholars, scientists, researchers, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students, institutional officials and those supporting the development of team science.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in this year's VIVO conference with contributions to the meeting. We request papers, panels and poster presentations exploring the many aspects of the world research community's vision for VIVO.

Submissions: All submissions are handled electronically at EasyChair. For information on submission requirements, refer to the Official Call for Papers http://vivoweb.org/files/VIVO%202012%20Call%20for%20Papers.pdf

Abstracts are due May 30.

Topics of interest:

Facilitating researcher collaboration and networking

Managing/discovering knowledge about researchers across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries

Approaches to the adoption of VIVO and related systems that interoperate through shared ontologies and Linked Open Data

The intersection of VIVO and international research standards

Research representation ontology/development

Open representations of research and implications for the research process, collaboration, and virtual research communities

Perspectives on policy, research representation, and research impact, including questions of privacy, individual vs. institutional sourcing of data, and change over time

Semantic Web development and extensions of the VIVO platform to reach the full Web community

Open research data and related issues in discovery, reuse, and attribution

Call for Apps

The conference is sponsoring a competition for applications using VIVO data to support science. Entries are due July 31. Refer to the Call for Applications for submission information, including eligibility, evaluation criteria and prizes.

Registration and additional conference information to follow.

About the Conference

The third annual VIVO conference runs from August 22 - 24, 2012 at the InterContinental in Miami, FL. This year's VIVO conference creates a unique opportunity for people from across the country and around the world to come together in the spirit of promoting scholarly collaboration and research discovery. Read more at the conference website, http://vivoweb.org/conference.

Call for Papers: Fifth International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2012)

September 3rd and 4th, Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

SMBM 2012 aims to bring together researchers from text and data mining in biomedicine, medical, bio- and chemoinformatics, and researchers active in biomedical ontology design and engineering, and the Semantic Web. The combined research helps to promote full integration of data and factual content from large text collections, biological databases, ontological and terminological resources, and from the Web.

However, many challenges have yet to be met to achieve this ambitious goal. Significant advances have been made and many working systems for tasks ranging from semantics driven literature analysis to cross-resource data analysis and open linked data on the web have been suggested and deployed. Where do we stand and how do we advance toward fully integrated systems combining the different solutions and data sources?

We are inviting papers from a full range of topics (see below), emphasizing in particular work on methods deployed in a production-like research environment, user-facing applications of text mining technology, the integration of text with domain resources such as content from reference databases (e.g., UniProt, EntrezGene, OMIM) and semantic resources such as GO, UMLS etc. We also welcome contributions from across the biomedical domains, including genomics, translational medicine, clinical practice, and public health.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Development and use of biomedical semantic resources

Terminology and ontology development for biomedical information systems including terminology evolution

Integration of text and data mining in the biomedical domain

(Semantic) Web mining of biomedical information

Text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval for the biomedical domain

Evaluation techniques and standards for text mining solutions

Annotation schemes for biomedical corpora

Text mining for resource building, e.g. ontologies, and resource enrichment, e.g., biomedical databases

Representation and discovery of biomedical domain knowledge

Image/caption processing in relation to content extraction

Domain-specific reasoning processes, e.g., to infer non-explicit information, validation (trust-worthiness, believability, safety) of extracted information

Integration of text mining in biological database curation workflows

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings that will be available online. We invite three categories of papers: full research papers, short papers and system papers. Research papers will be given an oral presentation, short papers a poster presentation, and systems papers will be presented in systems demonstration sessions. System papers should describe an implemented system related to a topic of interest that the authors will demonstrate live during the symposium. The final modality of presentation will be decided by the organizing committee.

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version for publication in a special issue of an open-access journal (details to be announced).

Submissions should follow the ACL instructions for authors, with a maximal limit of seven (7) pages (plus one optional page for references). The recommended length for system papers and poster submissions is four (4) pages. Manuscripts will be submitted electronically as PDF files. Reviewing will be double-blind, and submissions should therefore NOT contain author names or other obviously identifying information.

SMBM 2012 is the follow-up to to the successful series:

SMBM 2005 (EBI, U.K.), SMBM 2006 (University of Jena, Germany), SMBM 2008 (University of Turku, Finland) and SMBM 2010 (EBI, U.K). A parallel event (LBM: The International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine) has been held in 2005 (KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea), 2007 (Matrix, Biopolis, Singapore), 2009 (Jeju Island, South Korea) and 2011 (NTU, Singapore).

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: June 8th 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 1st 2012
Symposium dates: September 3-4th 2012

Call for Papers: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2012 Fall Symposium on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text

November 2-4, 2012 Arlington, Virginia

Submission Deadline: 25 May 2012

The amount of biological and medical literature has grown exponentially within the last decade. This data may be in the form of journal citations in PubMed, in the form of clinical summaries in healthcare institutions or in the form of blogs and user comments that express personal opinions on the different healthcare topics such as drug adverse effects or disease treatments. This material, be it expressed by researchers, medical professionals or medical care receivers, is of significant importance in terms of the wealth of information that it possesses. However, it is only valuable if efficient and reliable ways of accessing and analyzing that information are available.

In this symposium we would like to address novel research on computational techniques for information retrieval and knowledge discovery from biomedical and clinical texts, with a focus on machine learning and/or natural language processing, as well as novel applications of existing techniques to the open problems in text processing in biomedical domain. We will invite several speakers from the biomedical text processing community who will present current research problems in this field, and we will invite contributed talks on novel learning approaches that can improve the analysis and retrieval of biological and medical information.

We solicit two types of submissions to the symposium:

1. Contributed talks and/or posters
We invite submissions that address new algorithmic and methodological contributions to the spectrum of problems in biomedical text analysis, where textual resources can include semi-structured and unstructured biomedical text, clinical text, social media and any other healthcare related text media.

2. Open problems
For open problems, we request the authors to submit a one page description that motivates and explains an existing open problem in text analysis and information retrieval in biomedical domain. The main goal here is to foster active discussion.

Papers for the symposium will be collected and made into an AAAI technical report, which will be distributed to attendees on CD and included in the AAAI Digital Library. The issuance of technical report allows the work to be cited.

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission Deadline: May 25, 2012

Notification of acceptance: June 22, 2012

Camera-ready papers : September 7, 2012

AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium: November 2-4, 2012

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to direct your questions to
Rezarta.Islamaj@nih.gov or Lana.Yeganova@nih.gov

AAAI 2012 Fall Symposium Organizers:
Lana Yeganova, PhD, Staff Scientist, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

Rezarta Islamaj Dogan, PhD, Research Fellow, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.

Vahan Grigoryan, PhD, Associate, Cloud Analytics Group, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Mark Dredze, PhD, Assistant Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, Johns Hopkins University.

Call for Papers: Analyzing and Improving Collaborative eScience with Social Networks (eSoN 12)

Workshop to be held with IEEE e-Science 2012

Monday, 8 October 2012, Chicago, IL, USA

Social networking is profoundly changing the way that people communicate and interact on a daily basis. As eScience is inherently collaborative, social networks can serve as a vital means for supporting information and resource sharing, aiding discovery of connected individuals, improving communication between globally dispersed individuals, and even measuring scientific impact. Consequently, eScience systems are increasingly integrating social networking concepts to improve collaboration. For example researcher profiles and groups exist in publication networks, such as Google scholar and Mendeley, and eScience infrastructures, such as MyExperiment, NanoHUB and GlobusOnline all utilize social networking principles to enhance scientific collaboration. In addition to incorporating explicit social networks, eScience infrastructures can also leverage implicit social networks extracted from relationships expressed in collaborative activities (e.g. publication and grant authorship or citation networks).

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from a diverse range of areas to establish a new community focused on the application of social networking to analyze and improve scientific collaboration. There are two complementary areas of focus for this workshop 1) how to efficiently share infrastructure and software resources, such as data and tools through social networks, and 2) how to analyze and enhance collaboration in eScience through both implicit and explicit social networks, for example analyzing scientific impact through citation networks or improving collaboration by associating data and tools with networks of publications and researchers.

This workshop represents the amalgamation of two complementary workshops held in 2011: Social Networks for CCGrids (SN4CCGrids) held at CCGrid 2011 and Measuring the Impact of eScience Research (MeSR) held at eScience 2011.
Scope of workshop

The topics of interest are, but not limited to, the use of social networks to analyze and improve collaborative eScience:

The use of social networks and social networking concepts in eScience and eResearch
Social network applications used for eScience
Social network based resource sharing and collaboration architectures
New forms of collaborative computing and resource sharing
Social Cloud computing
Novel applications of digital relationships and trust
Definition of novel principals, models and methodologies for harnessing digital relationships
Extraction of implicit social networks from scientific activities (publication, citation and grants)
Analysis of collaborative scientific activity through social networks

Submission instructions

Authors are invited to submit papers containing unpublished, original work (not under review elsewhere) of up to 8 pages of double column text using single spaced 10 point size on 8.5 x 11 inch pages, as per IEEE 8.5 x 11 manuscript guidelines.

Templates are available from: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

Authors should submit a PDF or PostScript (level 2) file that will print on a PostScript printer. Papers conforming to the above guidelines can be submitted through the workshop's paper submission system: TBD

At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the eScience 2012 workshop registration fee, as well as the conference fee. All accepted papers will be published by the IEEE in the same volume as the main conference. All papers will be reviewed by an International Programme Committee (with a minimum of 3 reviews per paper). Papers submissions should be performed using the XXX system, by the date mentioned below.

Important dates

Paper Submissions Due: July 27, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: August 27, 2012
Camera Ready Versions Due: September 17, 2012
Workshop: October 8, 2012

Call for Research: Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication

The primary aims of biomedical peer review are to select and improve research and other academic work for funding and publication by identifying and reducing bias and increasing the validity, quality, credibility, and worth of scientific reports. This remains a difficult balance.1​ Widespread advances in technology and communications have improved the speed, efficiency, and reach of scientific publication and have transformed the ways scientists, authors, reviewers, editors, clinicians, and the public interact with information and with each other. But these same advances also threaten the very nature of peer review and scientific publication. The need to critically evaluate the purpose, foundations, developments, and future prospects of this entire enterprise—from research proposal through and beyond publication—has never been stronger.

Since the first announcement in 1986, we have held 6 Peer Review Congresses at 4-year intervals with the aim of placing peer review and scientific publication under the same evaluation that science undergoes. The success of these congresses is clear from the stimulus they have given to new research into the processes whereby scientific work is funded, presented, and disseminated, peer reviewed, edited, published, enhanced, accessed, and used by others to change practice, influence funding and policy decisions, inspire discourse and debate, and stimulate new research.2,3​,4,5​,6,7​,8,9​ This progress has been measured both in increase in the number of abstracts submitted to each congress (from 50 for the first to more than 200 each for the last 2) and in MEDLINE citations to peer review research (from 109 in 1994 to 382 in 2010).

We now announce the Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication to be held in Chicago, Illinois, September 8-10, 2013. This congress, organized by JAMA and the BMJ, will feature 3 days of presentations of original research. As with the previous congresses, the aims of the 2013 congress are to improve the quality and credibility of peer review and selection processes used by journals and funders and to help advance the quality, efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of biomedical publication and the dissemination of scientific information throughout the world. As before, we urge scientists, editors, publishers, funders, readers, and all who are interested in the processes by which science is funded and published to get going on their research.

In addition to the topics traditionally addressed during the Peer Review Congresses, such as the effects of peer review and editorial processes on the quality of scientific reporting,10 abstracts summarizing original, high-quality research on any aspect of scientific peer review, publication, and information exchange are welcome. We also are eager to see new research on the technologic advances and innovations that continue to influence all aspects of biomedical publication and the dissemination of scientific information. The increasing sophistication of research into these issues means that preference will be given to well-developed studies with generalizable results (eg, multijournal, prospective, multiyear trials and controlled studies). Retrospective studies, systematic reviews, bibliometric and other data analyses, surveys, and other types of studies will also be considered. Abstracts that report new research and findings will be given priority.

Topics of Interest for the Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication

Existence of every sort of bias and efforts to eliminate biased reporting

Editorial and peer review decision making and responsibilities

Mechanisms of peer review and editorial decision making usedby journals and funders

Evaluations of the quality, validity, and practicality of peer review and editorial decision making

Quality assurance for reviewers and editors

Editorial policies and responsibilities

Editorial freedom and integrity

Peer review of grant proposals

Research and publication ethics

Ethical concerns for researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, and funders

Authorship, contributorship, and responsibility for published material

Conflicts of interest

Research and publication misconduct

Confidentiality

Effects of funding and sponsorship on research and publication

Influence of external stakeholders: funders, journal owners, advertisers/sponsors, policy makers, legal representatives, and the news media

Evaluations of and mechanisms for improving the quality of reporting

Effectiveness of guidelines and standards designed to improve the quality of scientific publication

Evaluations of the quality of print and online information

Quality and reliability of data presentation and scientific images

Quality and use of online supplemental content

Quality and effectiveness of new forms of scientific articles

Models for peer review and scientific publication

Online publication

Open access

Open peer review

Data sharing and access

Prepublication posting and release of information

Postpublication review, communications, and influence

Changes in readership and usage of peer-reviewed published content

Presentation, enhancement, and quality of scientific information in multimedia and new media

Quality, use, and effects of publication metrics and usage statistics

Quality and influence of sponsored supplements and related media, gray literature, and other forms of publication

Quality and effectiveness of content tagging, markup, and structures

The future of scientific publication

Dissemination of scientific and scholarly information

Methods for improving the quality, efficiency, and equitable distribution of biomedical information

New technologies that affect the quality, integrity, dissemination, and access of biomedical information

The impact of social networking and new media on science critique and dissemination

REFERENCES

1. Lock S. A Difficult Balance: Editorial Peer Review in Medicine. London, UK: Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust; 1985.

2. Rennie D. Guarding the guardians: a conference on editorial peer review. JAMA. 1986;256(17):2391–2392, pmid:3773144.Free Full Text

3. Guarding the guardians: research on editorial peer review; selected proceedings from the First International Congress on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication. May 10-12, 1989, Chicago, Ill. JAMA. 1990;263(10):1317–1441, pmid:2304208.

4. Rennie D, Flanagin A. The Second International Congress on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication. JAMA. 1994;272(2):91, pmid:8015138.

5. Third International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication. JAMA. 1998;280(3, theme issue):203–306.

6. Fourth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication. JAMA. 2002;287(21, theme issue):2759–2871.

7. Rennie D, Flanagin A, Smith R, Smith J. Fifth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication: call for research. JAMA. 2003;289(11):1438.

8. Rennie D, Flanagin A, Godlee F, Smith J. Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, September 2009: call for research. JAMA. 2007;298(20):2420–2421.

9. Seventh International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication. http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/peerhome.htm. Accessed January 25, 2012.

10. Jefferson T, Rudin M, Brodney Folse S, Davidoff F. Editorial peer review for improving the quality of reports of biomedical studies. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007;(2):MR000016, doi:10.1002/14651858.MR000016.pub3, pmid:17443635.Medline