ISMB/ECCB 2025 Meeting

Submission Types

We invite the submissions of proceedings papers (9 pages), short papers (4 pages), flash updates (1-2 pages), and poster abstracts (1 page). We also invite Early Career Submissions as lightning talks (1-2 pages).These submissions are intended to provide graduate students with the opportunity to present a short description of their research project at one of the leading conferences in computational biology and get first-hand feedback and mentorship from senior researchers in their field. This submission is open to Masters and Doctoral students who have not defended their thesis before the submission deadline. 

All relevant topics are invited. Example topics include (but not limited to):

• Ontologies for infectious disease monitoring and prediction

• Ontologies for climate change and its impact on human health

• Ontologies for bioimaging

• Ontologies in annotations, mapping applications, and metadata standards

• FAIR data systems and application of ontologies and other Linked Open Data

• Bio-curation platforms, collaborative ontology authoring

• Ontology evolution, quality, and evaluation

• Ontologies, knowledge representation, and reasoning

• Machine (deep) learning and ontologies

• Explainable AI and semantics

• Text mining and ontologies

• Semantic Web-enabled applications

• Ontologies for biomedical research, health informatics, and health care

• Flash Updates on new and/or existing ontologies, Linked Open Data resources, tools, and applications

• Descriptions of DevOps and other types of technical infrastructure and pipelines

Submission Instructions

Submissions can be made on the ISMB site (https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2025/home). For proceedings, please follow the instructions provided on the ISMB site. For all other submissions, please prepare your submission using the templates on the Bio-Ontologies website (https://www.bio-ontologies.org.uk/2025-meeting).

All submissions are reviewed (review criteria provided on the Bio-Ontologies website). Following review, successful short papers (20 minutes), flash updates (5 minutes), and early career (5 minutes) submissions will be presented at either the Bio-Ontologies COSI, the BOSC COSI, or the joint Bio-Ontologies and BOSC COSI session. The selection of work to a specific COSI session is at the discretion of the Bio-Ontologies and BOSC joint organizing committee. Unsuccessful paper submissions will automatically be considered for flash updates presentations. All submissions will be considered for poster presentations.

Accepted submissions require that one author register for the conference and present the work. The presenter should identify themselves as the corresponding author during the submission process. All accepted submissions will be cataloged in the 2025 Bio-Ontologies Zenodo Community and provided with a citable DOI. Accepted submissions will also be invited to publish an extended version of their work in the Bio-Ontologies Thematic Series through the Journal of Biomedical Semantics. 

Submission Review Criteria

All submissions to Bio-Ontologies are reviewed. Review criteria include:

• Relevance of the topic to conference attendees.

• Significance of the problem, such that reviewers understand that it is a problem that is important and worth solving.

• Novelty of the approach, including critical discussion of related work.

• Soundness and potential for reproducibility of the study and/or methods.

• Quality of writing, including readability and clearly stated contribution(s). 

If you have any questions please feel free to send us an email (bioontologies@gmail.com), direct message us on Slack (bioontologies.slack.com), or post a message on Twitter (@bioontologies) or our LinkedIn Group (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13998260/).

Bio-Ontologies has been running since 1998, please use the ISMB Annual Meetings drop-down menu above to access content from prior meetings.