CfP: JBMS Ontology Issue 2015

The Journal of Biomedical Semantics devotes a review cycle and a joint
collection of publications to papers describing ontologies of value to
the biological community. The 2015 JBMS Ontology Issue contains:

- papers describing new ontologies that formalize and describe
  biological or biomedical domain knowledge at different levels,
  including genomic, proteomic, tissue, organ and organism levels, as
  well as organizational structures such as systems, topologies,
  functional relatedness and others, and
- papers describing substantial updates to existing ontologies.

Important dates
---------------

Presubmission inquiry due: 15 October 2015
Manuscripts due: 1 December 2015

Submission
----------

Authors wishing to submit manuscripts for the 2015 JBMS Ontology Issue
should read and follow these instructions.

Authors must contact the organisers at bmontol@jbiomedsem.com to check
the suitability of their proposed submission by 15 October, 2015 at
the latest. A maximum one page summary should be submitted for this
purpose, outline the content of the ontology and its applications in
biological and biomedical research. Following acceptance of the
proposal, the submission of the full manuscripts to the JBMS Ontology
Issue will be via the JBMS website by 1 December, 2015.

We will accept two types of manuscript: Ontology Descriptions and
Ontology Updates:
- An ontology description can be used to describe an ontology that has
  not previously been published in a significant journal.
- An ontology update describes the recent development and changes to an
  ontology. Ontology updates are useful when an ontology has already been
  published, and the authors wish to make the research community aware of
  improvement, changes and further development of the ontology. The
  authors should point out the improvements and advancements that have
  been made since the latest publication of the ontology (e.g., number of
  additional terms, improvements in formal or textual term definitions,
  extension of the ontology scope, novel applications).

Ontologies published in the JBMS Ontology Issue must be freely available
at the time of submission. The proposal and the manuscripts must contain
a description of the restrictions on the use of the ontology, e.g., a
statement such as "This ontology is free and open to all users." We will
consider manuscripts describing ontologies that are free for academic
use only, in which case the conditions of use must be described in
detail. We will not consider ontologies that are not available at the
time of submission, or which require the payment of a fee. If in doubt,
please contact the organizers at bmontol@jbiomedsem.com.

All proposals and articles must contain a link to a website at which the
ontology is available, the names, affiliations, and email addresses of
all authors.

All proposals and articles must contain a description of the actual or
intended use of the ontology for biological or biomedical research.
If applicable, the one page summary should provide complete citations
for previous publications of the ontology.

For proposals given approval, the manuscript submission deadline will be
on 1 December 2015. Authors should submit their manuscript
electronically through the JBMS Manuscripts submission site
(http://www.jbiomedsem.com).

Authors may consider to use the name of the ontology as the first word
in the title of the article and should include within the abstract a
valid URL from which the ontology can be accessed. JBMS is available in
full-text form on the web (www.jbiomedsem.com), and each article will
contain a link to its ontology URL. The manuscript should include a
description of the ontology including the coverage of domain
knowledge. Submissions should typically be 4-5 printed journal pages in
length, and authors are encouraged to be succinct in their writing.

The ontology must be completely functional and have been tested at the
time of submission. Reviewers should not be expected to debug the
loading of the ontology into a viewer and significant problems that
should have been picked up during testing will be grounds for rejection.
For specific information on manuscript format, please consult the
general Instructions to Authors at
http://www.jbiomedsem.com/authors/instructions/database or
http://www.jbiomedsem.com/authors/instructions/research.

For any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the organizers of
the JBMS Ontology Issue (Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Robert
Hoehndorf) at bmontol@jbiomedsem.com.

With best wishes,
Dietrich & Robert.

Received on Thursday, 10 September 2015 21:35:01 UTC