CIBB 2021: the 17th International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (online)

Post-conference proceedings and journal supplements

After the conference, the authors of all the accepted short papers presented at the conference will be invited to submit an extended version of their manuscripts to the conference proceedings book in Springer Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) or to a journal supplement in BMC Bioinformatics or BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

The publication of the accepted extended articles in the Springer LNBI will be free of charge for the authors, and the articles published will be non-open access. That means that readers, universities, and libraries will have to pay a subscription to read these articles. Springer LNBI is a subseries of Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

The publication of each accepted extended article in the BMC journal supplements, instead, will cost approximately 1,800€ to be paid by the article's authors to BioMed Central. The articles published in the BMC journals will then be open access and free to read for anyone in the world.
Regarding the BMC supplements, we expect all the extended articles to be proposed as "research", "database" or "software" content type. If some authors think their article should be prepared following a different content type, they should get in touch with the conference chairs to discuss it (email: cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com).

The authors are allowed to post their extended articles on preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv before the submission to the Springer LNBI book or to the BMC journal supplements.

The authors are allowed to use all the content (text, images, tables) of their short papers for the preparation of the extended articles.
The title of each extended article should be slightly different from the title of the corresponding short paper.
The list of authors and their order should be the same between short paper and extended article; possible changes should be discussed with the conference chairs (email: cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com).

2022-02-15 Update. The CIBB 2021 option is finally available on the BMC supplements submission website. Sorry for all the delays. Please proceed with the manuscript submission before the scheduled deadline of 16th February 2022. To visualize the CIBB 2021 option, you need to start a new submission from scratch on the BMC Supplements website.

2022-03-04 Update. As some of the authors know, there have been some issues with the handling of the submitted extended articles. BioMed Central took 16 days to add our CIBB 2021 guest editors to the BMC Supplements website list of editors, and this wait delayed the start of the review for most of the submitted manuscripts. All the articles are under review now.

2022-04-25 Update. All the extended articles submitted to the BMC supplements, except two of them, have been reviewed and the authors have been informed about their first outcome decision and their reviews by the guest editors. We are still handling the first review phase of two articles, whose delay has been caused by reviewers who originally had accepted to provide review reports but then did not actually submit anything in the due time. This problem has delayed the review phase and made it necessary to look for new reviewers and subsequently to wait for their review reports. We apologize to the authors of these two articles for this delay.

2022-05-17 Update. All the extended articles submitted to the BMC supplements have now received the first review decision and the first round of reviews from the handling guest editors. Some of these articles have already finished the first phase of the review process and are now in the hands of a BioMed editor-in-chief, who will make the final decision on them. In the meantime, we started the review phase of the extended articles for the Springer LNBI proceedings book through EquinOCS.

2022-06-14 Update. The review process of the articles submitted to Springer LNBI is moving forward on EquinOCS. The authors of almost 74% of the submitted articles received the first round of reviews and were notified about the first outcome. There has been a delay regarding the other 26% of the articles, again due to reviewers who originally had accepted to provide review reports but then did not actually submit anything in the due time. This problem made it necessary for us guest editors to look for new reviewers, to reassign the submitted articles to them, and to wait for new reports. We apologize for this delay.

2022-06-27 Update. The review process of the articles submitted to Springer LNBI is moving forward on EquinOCS. The authors of all the submitted articles received the first round of reviews and the notification about the first outcome. Some articles are already experiencing the second phase of the review process.

2022-07-12 Update. We discovered another flaw in the Editorial Manager website provided by BioMed for the articles of the CIBB 2021 supplement: sometimes, when the articles are submitted by the authors, the system does not notify the guest editors about it, causing many delays as you can imagine. We invite the authors of all the articles under review who would like to get updates about the status of their papers to contact Omar El Bakry omar.elbakry(AT)biomedcentral.com or Myra Morelada at myra.moraleda(AT)springernature.com of the BioMed Supplements office. When contacting them, please mention your article's ID (SUPP-D-22-000XX) and its title both in the email subject and in the email text.
If you receive no reply from Omar El Bakry and Myra Morelada, feel free to to contact the editor-in-chief Alison Cuff at alison.cuff(AT)biomedcentral.com

2022-07-21 Update. Both the review phases of the articles submitted to the BMC supplements and of the Springer LNBI volume are moving on. Springer informed us that the number of the CIBB 2021 proceedings volume will be 13483. The title of the book therefore will be:

Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, 17th International Meeting, CIBB 2021, Virtual Event, November 15–17, 2021, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 13483, Springer Cham, 2022.

2022-08-08 Update. The first articles of the supplement of the BMC Bioinformatics journal regarding CIBB 2021 have been published in the BMC Bioinformatics volume 23 supplement 6.

2022-09-26 Update. Some articles of the CIBB 2021 supplements of BMC Bioinformatics and BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making have been recommended for acceptance by the guest editors and are awaiting for a final assessment from the BioMed editor-in-chief. We apologize for this delay, which is completely out of our control. Authors can try to solicit BioMed by writing to the editor-in-chieff Alison Cuff at alison.cuff(AT)biomedcentral.com, and to the supplement editors Omar El Bakry at omar.elbakry(AT)biomedcentral.com and Gary Beardmore at gary.beardmore(AT)springernature.com, indicating the article's ID (SUPP-D-22-000XX) and its title both in the email subject and in the email text.

2022-09-30 Update. Springer published the landing webpage of the CIBB 2021 proceedings' volume: Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, CIBB 2021 Revised Selected Papers, Springer Lecture Notes In Bioinformatics (LNBI), volume 13483.

2022-11-17 Update. The first articles of the supplement of the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal regarding CIBB 2021 have been published in the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making volume 22 supplement 6.

2022-11-28 Update. The proceedings of CIBB 2021 Springer Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) volume 13483.

Springer LNBI proceedings

The authors of accepted short papers interested in submitting an extended article to the Springer LNBI book need write an email to cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com as soon as possible indicating their intentions. This way can know how many submitted chapters we will receive.

The authors can read the Springer LNBI/LNCS guidelines article preparation here. The suggested limit for the chapters' length is 12 pages, while the strict limit is 15 pages.
The articles can be submitted on the EquinOCS website.

The submitted extended articles will go through a single review phase, where the three general chairs of the CIBB 2021 conference will serve as proceedings' editors. The final decision on the acceptance or rejection of the submitted extended chapters will be made by the proceedings' editors.

Deadline. Submission of extended articles for the Springer LNBI book: ~~30 March 2022~~ 20 April 2022

BMC supplements

The authors of accepted short papers interested in submitting an extended article to a BMC supplement need to download, fill, sign, scan and submit the supplement submission letter of interest (ODT file) to cibb2021(AT)protonmail.com before 21 January 2021. The red text parts of the letter should be replaced with the requested information. The letter should be submitted as a PDF file attached to an email. This document is important for us so we can know how many extended articles we will receive.

The authors can read the BMC Bioinformatics guidelines here and the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making guidelines here. There are no page limits for the BMC journals.
The articles can be submitted on the BMC Supplements website.

The submitted extended articles will go through two review phases. In the first phase, the three general chairs of the CIBB 2021 conference will serve as guest editors. Some special session chairs might be involved as additional guest editors, in case of high number of submissions. At the end of the first review phase, the guest editors will recommend all the submitted extended articles for acceptance or rejection, and pass them all to the BMC journals' editor-in-chiefs who will take care of the second review phase.
The BMC editor-in-chief can decide to confirm the guest editors' recommendation, or to start a new review phase (with new reviewers invited, new reviews, new requests, etc). The BMC editor-in-chief will eventually make the final decision on the acceptance or rejection of each extended manuscript. Please notice that, even if the guest editors suggest the acceptance for a specific paper, the BMC editor-in-chief can still decide to reject it (this case is quite rare but it can still happen).

Deadline. Submission of extended articles for the BMC supplements: 16 February 2022

We will try handle the review phase of the extended articles submitted to the BMC supplements quickly so that any rejected manuscripts can be submitted to the Springer LNBI book, if the authors want it.

Open data, open source, open science

To promote scientific reproducibility and to allow new scientific analyses and discoveries, we invite the authors of all the articles to publicly share their datasets online following the FAIR guidelines and to publicly share their software code online under public copyright license.
Datasets can be openly shared on FigShare, on Zenodo, on Kaggle, or on the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository. Software code can be openly shared on GitHub, GitLab, or SourceForge.

Article's authors who put their datasets or software code online can indicate the URLs where to download them in the "Data and software availability" sections of their articles.

Advice on how to write scientific articles

We invite the authors to read the following scientific articles of the preeminent PLOS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules collection before preparing their extended manuscripts:
   Ten simple rules for getting published, Philip E. Bourne, PLOS Computational Biology 1(5): e57, 2005.
   Ten simple rules for structuring papers, Brett Mensh, and Konrad Kording, PLOS Computational Biology 13(9): e1005619, 2017.
   Ten simple (empirical) rules for writing science, Cody J. Weinberger, James A. Evans, and Stefano Allesina, PLOS Computational Biology 11(4): e1004205, 2015.
   Ten simple rules for writing research papers, Weixiong Zhang, PLOS Computational Biology 10(1): e1003453, 2014.

And we invite the authors to read the following article before addressing the comments of the reviewers
Ten simple rules for writing a response to reviewers, William Stafford Noble, PLOS Computational Biology 13(10): e1005730, 2017.