Bioinformatics 2007 23(13):i1-i4; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm285
© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
ISMB/ECCB 2007
This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at
the Fifteenth Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular
Biology, which was held jointly with the Sixth European Conference
on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB 2007;
http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/).
The conference was held from 21–25 July 2007 at the Austria
Center in Vienna, Austria. The conference united the annual
meetings of the International Society for Computational Biology
(ISCB) and of the European Computational Biology Community.
The papers presented here are noteworthy for several reasons.
First, for the second time, papers are open access and freely
available to the worldwide community ahead of the conference
and subsequently form an online only part of a regular issue
of the journal Bioinformatics. Second, the review process was
conducted even more rigorously than in previous years, as we
describe below. We believe the scientific content to be outstanding.
At the time of print, we expect the conference to become the
largest scientific event in Computational Biology worldwide
in the year 2007. This attests to the role of the conference
and its organizing societies in furthering science in Computational
Biology and fostering interdisciplinary scientific dialog on
an international scale.
The call for papers resulted in 417 submissions in 11 different categories (Table 1). Area Chairs were recruited for each category and they in turn assigned reviewers for each paper. The Program Committee comprised over 300 reviewers who were assisted by a sizeable number of subreviewers. Aside from a few editorial rejects, all papers received at least two reviews; most were reviewed by three experts. During a 10-day period of internet discussion, the referees exchanged their views on controversial papers, based on the original reviews. After that period the area chairs decided on 51 ‘definite accepts’ and handed 40 more papers over to an inter-area discussion involving all area chairs and the program chair. That discussion was carried out over the internet and took two intensive phone conferences, lasted for 10 more days and yielded 15 more papers that were accepted for the conference. In total 66 papers have been included corresponding to an acceptance rate of 15.8%. The ratio is less than for typical submission to Bioinformatics, for three reasons. First, papers submitted to ISMB/ECCB 2007 had to have the quality of a regular submission to Bioinformatics. In addition, they had to make for interesting talks and, finally, they had to be acceptable without major revision, because the timing of the paper selection process for the conference did not allow for a second round of reviewing.
Corresponding authors of submitted papers came from 42 countries,
194 papers were from North America, 140 from Europe and Israel,
69 from Asia, 5 from South America, 7 from Australia and 2 from
Africa.
The contributed papers presented here comprise only one aspect of the scientific offerings of the conference, albeit a very important one. Ten invited keynotes were held by outstanding scientists in the field (Table 2), among them this year's ISCB Award Winners Eran Segal (Overton Prize) and Temple Smith (ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award). Furthermore, the conference offered a Highlight Papers Track organized by Burkhard Rost featuring 65 talks on previously published high-quality work in computational biology, a PLoS Abstracts Track organized by Barbara Bryant, Phil Bourne and Steven Brenner with well over 30 talks on so far unpublished biology-oriented work in computational biology, and six ‘Special Sessions’ on relevant up-to-date topics (Table 3). Over 950 posters were selected to be presented in a Poster Session organized by Marco Punta. Reinhard Schneider organized an Industry Track with scientific presentations from industry and Shoba Ranganathan organized a Software Demonstrations Track. Before the conference, one Satellite Meeting and seven Special Interest Groups Meetings (SIGs) were held that were selected by Hershel Safer, Jill Mesirov and David Gilbert (Table 4), and there was a day of tutorials, featuring 14 tutorials selected by Janet Kelso and Fran Lewitter (Table 5).
We would like to thank the Area Chairs and reviewers for the
quality they have brought to the conference, to Mario Albrecht
for managing the paper selection process and coordinating the
voluminous dialog with authors and reviewers, Andrei Voronkov
for technical support with the EasyChair system which was used
for managing the selection process, the team at Oxford University
Press for proof-setting the papers, and Steven Leard for helping
in many ways to get the proceedings out on time.
Thomas Lengauer, Conference Chair, ISMB/ECCB 2007 Burkhard Rost, Peter Schuster, Conference Co-Chairs, ISMB/ECCB 2007.
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