The Call for Abstracts for full talks is now open for the 2012 conference on Informatics for Phylogenetics, Evolution, and Biodiversity (iEvoBio), at http://ievobio.org/ocs2/index.php/ievobio/2012. See below for instructions.

Accepted talks will be 15 minutes in length and will be presented during the full talk session of the conference. Because the number of program slots for full talks is limited, some talks may be moved to the Lightning Talk session (5 minutes in length).

Submitted talks should be in the area of informatics aimed at advancing research in phylogenetics, evolution, and biodiversity, including new tools, cyberinfrastructure development, large-scale data analysis, and visualization.

Submissions should be 1 page long at most and include a title, a list of contributors, and an abstract. The abstract should provide an overview of the talk's subject, and give enough detail to allow reviewers to decide whether the submission merits a full talk, or whether it should be moved to a Lightning Talk session. If the subject of the talk is a specific software component for use by the research community, the abstract must state the license and give the URL where the source code is available so reviewers can verify that the open-source requirement(*) is met.

The deadline for submission is April 2, 2012. We intend to notify authors of accepted talks before early registration for iEvoBio (and Evolution) ends. Further instructions for submission are at the following URL: http://ievobio.org/ocs2/index.php/ievobio/2012/schedConf/cfp

Full talks are one of the five kinds of contributed content that feature in iEvoBio. The other four are: 1) Lightning talks (5 mins long), 2) Challenge entries, 3) Software bazaar demonstrations, and 4) Birds-of-a-Feather gatherings. The Call for Challenge entries is already open (see http://ievobio.org/challenge.html). The calls for contribution to the other three sessions will open later, and will remain open until shortly before the conference or until the respective track fills up. In addition, 2012 iEvoBio sponsor Biomatters Ltd will be running the Geneious Challenge alongside this year’s iEvoBio Challenge, see http://ievobio.org/geneious_challenge.html for more information.

More details about the conference and program are available at http://ievobio.org. You can also find continuous updates on the conference's Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/iEvoBio and Google+ page, or subscribe to the low-traffic iEvoBio announcements mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/ievobio-announce.

iEvoBio 2012 is sponsored by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) and by Biomatters Ltd., in partnership with the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and the Systematic Biologists (SSB).

The iEvoBio 2012 Organizing Committee: Hilmar Lapp, US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (chair) Robert Beiko, Dalhousie University Nico Cellinese, University of Florida and Florida Museum of Natural History Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado at Boulder Rebecca Kao, Denver Botanic Gardens Ellinor Michel, Natural History Museum, London Nadia Talent, Royal Ontario Museum Andrea Thomer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(*) iEvoBio and its sponsors are dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development (see http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) and reuse within the research community. For this reason, if a submitted talk concerns a specific software system for use by the research community, that software must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/), and be available for download, including source code, by a tar/zip file accessed through ftp/http or through a widely used version control system like cvs, Subversion, git, Bazaar, or Mercurial. Authors of full talks who cannot meet this requirement at the time of submission should state their intentions, and are advised that the requirement must be met by July 9, 2012, at the latest.