PeerJ Collection of the German Conference on Bioinformatics 2015

We are pleased to announce that we will be publishing a PeerJ Collection for the upcoming German Conference on Bioinformatics 2015. The meeting will happen in September 2015, and after it has taken place the Collection will include the papers of the contributions to the conference. We asked Sven Rahmann, an organizer of the conference, to write a guest blog post explaining some of the background and motivation for this collection.

The German Conference on Bioinformatics (GCB) has a long history; it started in 1994 when the field was still in its infancy. With a strong focus on community and young PhD students, it has remained different from other research conferences in the field over the years. More information about the conference, including a call for papers, can be found here. This year, GCB will feature four types of talks:

(1) on reviewed proceedings papers
(2) on reviewed highlight abstracts
(3) junior research group presentations
(4) flash poster presentations

Note: Submission of papers and abstracts is still possible until June 30 on EasyChair. Poster abstracts can be submitted till July 31.

In recent years, it has been a recurring discussion as to how to publish conference proceedings papers. In computer science, conference proceedings are the main publication model, while in the life sciences, journal publications are more important. At the German Conference on Bioinformatics (a field which span s both Computer Science and Biology), we would like to offer both possibilities to all attendees!

This is why we decided to publish the accepted abstracts (those that pass our peer-review for the conference) as PeerJ PrePrints in a special “GCB’15” Collection at PeerJ. This then makes it very easy to turn those papers into a journal submission to either PeerJ or PeerJ Computer Science. Of course, full journal papers may also be submitted to any other journal of the authors choice that accepts existing preprints.

We look forward to seeing the range of submissions to this year’s conference, and we look forward to publishing the output in this PeerJ Collection.