Links within this page: Publication Fees | Key Dates | Topics | Submission Guidelines | Review Process | Conference Proceedings | Transfers to Bioinformatics Advances
ISMB 2026 invites submissions of full papers (not abstracts) consisting of new, unpublished work, reporting theoretical, computational, and statistical advances in computational biology and its intersections with other fields.
Submissions are encouraged to report on advances in algorithm development and optimization, data structures, data visualization, artificial intelligence/machine learning, text mining, statistical inference, database and ontology development, image analysis, and citizen and open science to analyze all types of biological data.
While we encourage submissions in new and emerging areas, we expect that the majority of submissions addressing topical biological domains will fall into one of the areas below. Please note that during the EasyChair submission process, you will: 1) select your "Area" (list below) and 2) select one or more of the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs) best suited for the presentation of your research from within the area. (Learn more about COSIs here).
ISCB strongly prefers that submissions accepted for oral presentation be presented in-person at the conference venue. We understand that some presenters will have good reasons to avoid in-person attendance. ISCB will grant remote presentation options for reasons associated to maternity/paternity leave, care for a family member, personal/medical disability, sickness, or visa problems. Presenters are expected to attend in person unless genuine barriers exist. Inability implies circumstance, not choice. If unable to participate in-person you will need to request a waiver by writing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. at the earliest opportunity.
Any pre-approved virtual presenters will be required to provide a pre-recorded talk for the virtual platform library in advance of the conference as a precaution due to possible technical issues.
ISMB 2026 follows the ISCB policy for acceptable use of large language models (https://www.iscb.org/iscb-pol
Publication Fees
Authors of accepted Proceedings papers are responsible for the publication fee of $700 USD. This is a substantial reduction from the publication fees customary for OUP journals. ISCB is committed to supporting all of its members, especially those from underdeveloped nations and/or those without funding. If your manuscript is accepted and you are unable to pay for the publication fees in part or in full, you may submit a fee waiver request to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please provide your name, full institute address, and a short (up to 50 words) justification of why you are unable to cover the publication fee with the subject line of ISMB 2026 Publications Fee Waiver Request.
Publication fee payments are due by May 7, 2026. The online proceedings payment system will open April 3, 2026.
Proceedings publications are part of an online-only special issue of Bioinformatics and are open access (CC-BY), fully citable, and indexed by Medline and ISI. See the conference proceedings for ISMB/ECCB 2025 for an example of online-only publication by Oxford University Press.
Key Dates
Topics
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Bioinformatics Education and Citizen Science Chair(s): |
Systematic examination and analysis of learning models, outcomes, and educational programs. Serious gaming and game-ification. |
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Bioinformatics of Microbes and Microbiomes Chair(s): |
Computational methods and algorithms for studying microbial organisms, viruses, and their communities from omics and marker data. |
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Biomedical Informatics Chair(s): |
Computational approaches to clinical and medical problems, including disease predisposition, diagnostic, progression, and treatment. Pharmacogenomics. |
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Equity and Diversity in Computational Biology Research Chair(s): |
Research that examines issues of equity, representation, diversity, or other elements related to datasets, methods, or the field at large; health policy; fairness in ML; biases in GWAS studies; bias in literature; biology/genomics of traditionally understudied groups. |
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Evolutionary, Comparative and Population Genomics Chair(s): |
Phylogeny estimation, and modelling variation and change under the influence of evolutionary processes. Selection and adaptation. Multi-species analyses. |
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Genome Sequence Analysis Chair(s): |
Assembly and mapping algorithms. Gene prediction and annotation. Detection, qualification, and annotation of genomic variants and their structural and functional effects. |
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Macromolecular Sequence, Structure, and Function Chair(s): |
onalysis and annotation of DNA, RNA, and proteins to predict, characterize, and understand their structure, function, and evolution. Includes protein design and imaging techniques for macromolecules. |
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Privacy and Security for Computational Biology Chair(s): |
Methods related to the protection of individualized molecular and medical information; privacy models; federated learning; GWAS on summary statistics; federated EHR data analysis; new approaches to federated data storage, access, and analysis. |
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Regulatory and Functional Genomics Chair(s): |
Transcriptomics, single-cell RNA techniques, non-coding RNA, epigenetics, chromatin structure. |
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Systems Biology and Networks Chair(s): |
Emergent properties and complex multi-component interactions within biological systems, considering genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and other -omic data; gene regulation and circuit design. |
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General Computational Biology Chair(s): |
Novel techniques in emerging areas of computational biology not covered by the other areas listed above, including intersections with other fields. You are encouraged to submit to one of the other thematic areas. If you feel your contribution is at the intersection of many fields, please pick one. If you still want to submit to this area, you will be asked to explain why. Please note that the submissions in this area and others are likely to be moved, subject to chairs’ considerations. |
Submission Guidelines
All submissions MUST select at least one corresponding author. Papers must be submitted by following the template for author submission to the OUP journal Bioinformatics; no other formats will be accepted. Using the OUP template, the paper length must not exceed nine pages. EasyChair will not allow uploading of papers that exceed 9 pages in length. The page count should include any required author information (submissions are not double-blind), abstract, figures, tables, and bibliography. Note that alt text is required for any image used in the paper. Papers must be submitted as a PDF. The paper must contain a structure abstract whose length does not exceed 250 words, divided into sub-sections under the following five headings: Motivation, Results, Availability and Implementation, Contact, and Supplementary Information (the latter only if applicable). The order and titles of the remaining paper sections can be chosen by the authors to best match their work. Violations of paper formatting, including changes ot the font size or spaces in the OUP template, and violations length rules will be grounds for rejection.
Authors of submissions will need to select 1st choice and 2nd choice areas most suitable for their paper (this is relevant for which Area Chairs/reviewers will review the paper). During submission, authors will be able to identify up to three COSIs most relevant to the topic of their submission (this is relevant for which COSI, i.e. conference track, the talk will be presented at if the paper is accepted). During the review process, three reviews will be sought. Papers may be moved between areas as appropriate—this is often necessary for load balance and fit between areas during the review process.
If absolutely necessary, submissions can be accompanied by supplementary material, similar to submissions to scientific journals. The supplementary material must be collected in a separate file that is appropriately marked and uploaded as an attachment on the paper submission page in EasyChair. However, we advise against adding supplementary material in general. Supplementary material will be published on the proceedings site alongside the online version of the conference paper. We do not support supplementary material presented at any other than the publisher's site. Additionally, OUP does not edit or typeset supplementary data—it is uploaded online exactly as it is received. Authors must ensure its accuracy before submitting.
Papers should be submitted in their final form since the evaluation procedure does not allow for additional rounds of refinement/modification in response to referee criticisms. Poor quality submissions or insufficiently prepared papers are very often rejected. Paper presenters must register and pay to attend and present at the conference.
All submitted Proceedings papers that use code must include a link to publicly accessible source code (e.g., a GitHub repository) in the manuscript and ensure reproducibility of the results presented in the paper, and wherever possible, links to data. The link ot the repository must be given in the "availability and Implementation" subsection of the Abstract of the paper. The repository must be sufficiently complete by the submission deadline for reviewers to examine, including detailed enough and clear documentation. Lack of code or reproducibility will be grounds for rejection.
ISMB does not accept previously published works through peer-reviewed publications. Please note that conference presentations, posting on recognized preprint servers (such as arXiv, bioRxiv, and PeerJ preprints), or posting on a personal or employer's website do not constitute prior publication. In case of doubt, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
After acceptance, papers will have to be formatted according to the layout style required by the OUP Bioinformatics journal and will be limited to 9 pages. Formatting requirements can be found at:
https://academic.oup.com/pages/authoring/journals/preparing_your_manuscript?login=true
Templates are available on OUP’s site for direct download:
http://static.primary.prod.gcms.the-infra.com/static/site/journals/document/oup-authoring-template.zip?node=7987de40f2eea956bc39
Note: the zip file may not download on some browsers/extensions. If you encounter this issue, please attempt on an unrelated browser (i.e., not Chrome and Edge, as both are built off the Chromium kernel).
Papers not conforming to guidelines will not be reviewed
Papers submitted for review should represent original, previously unpublished work. At the time the paper is submitted to ISMB 2026, and for the entire review period, the paper should not be under review by any other conference or scientific journal.
Papers will be accepted electronically via the submission system, as a PDF, until January 20, 2026, 11:59 PM in the time zone of your choice. *No extension will be granted*
Please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for questions concerning the scientific content of submissions.
Review Process
Submissions will be subject to two rounds of reviews, allowing the authors to reply to the reviewer comments. In the first round, the submissions will be classified into three categories: (a) accept/minor changes, (b) major changes, and (c) not accepted. Papers in the first category will be considered “conditionally" accepted without a second round of full review. Area Chairs will review the final version and, in some cases, ask the reviewers if concerns, if any, have been addressed. Authors of submissions in the second category will be given the opportunity to submit revised drafts based on the reviewer comments, with letters of response to the reviewers outlining the main changes and/or giving counterarguments to the reviewer points.
We expect the majority of papers to fall in categories (a) and (c), with category (b) reserved for papers that the reviewers identified as strong but with substantial issues that need to be addressed. Among the resubmitted papers, the second round of review will select the most suitable papers for presentation. All reviews of submitted papers are considered confidential and details are not disclosed outside of the review process. These will be published in the Bioinformatics journal and presented at the conference.
Conference Proceedings
Publication of the proceedings as an online part of the journal Bioinformatics will result in fully citable articles, indexed by Medline and ISI. See the conference proceedings for ISMB/ECCB 2025 for an example of online-only publication by Oxford University Press.
Accepted papers will be published as conference proceedings in an open-access, online-only section of a regular issue of the Bioinformatics journal with an electronic version distributed to conference delegates. The proceedings will be available online approximately one month prior to the conference opening.
ISMB 2026 provides authors of accepted papers with an oral presentation to provide an oral summary of their work. All presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes, including 3-4 minutes for discussion. Paper presenters must register and pay to attend and present at the conference.
Transfers to Bioinformatics Advances
Getting your paper accepted to the ISMB Proceedings is very competitive. For papers that are ranked highly but are not accepted, we will be making offers to transfer some manuscripts to the ISCB journal Bioinformatics Advances. Manuscripts and the associated ISMB reviews would only be transferred to the journal upon author agreement. By transferring the reviews, rapid decisions can be made by the journal. Papers accepted to Bioinformatics Advances would NOT be a part of the ISMB 2026 Proceedings and would NOT be offered a talk. Please also note that Bioinformatics Advances is fully open access and that the normal Open Access Charges for the journal would apply.
Authors may opt out of this transfer process at submission time.
