The Call for Lightning 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.

Lightning talks are short presentations of 5 minutes. They are ideal for drawing the attention of the audience to new developments, tools, and resources, or to subsequent events where more in-depth information can be obtained. Please also see our FAQ for more information (http://ievobio.org/faq.html#lightning). Lightning talks will be part of the more interactive program elements on both conference days.

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. Reviewers will judge whether a submission is within scope of the conference (see above). If applicable, the abstract must also state the license and give the URL where the source code is available so reviewers can verify that the open-source requirement(*) is met.

Review and acceptance of lightning talks will be on a rolling basis. The deadline for submission is the morning of the first day of the conference (July 10), but see below. Further instructions for submission are at the following URL: http://ievobio.org/ocs2/index.php/ievobio/2012/schedConf/cfp

Please make sure to choose the Lightning Talks track for your submission. Note that the number of lightning talk slots is finite and that therefore the track may fill up early. We cannot accept lightning talks until the open-source requirements are met, and so waiting with that until the deadline risks that the track is full by that time.

We ask all submitters of lightning talks to be willing to also serve as reviewers of such, as described above.

Lightning talks are only 1 of 5 kinds of contributed content that iEvoBio will feature. The other 4 are: 1) Full talks (open until April 2), 2) Challenge entries, 3) Software bazaar demonstrations, and 4) Birds-of- a-Feather gatherings. The Call for Challenge entries remains open (see http://ievobio.org/challenge.html). The calls for contribution to the other two 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.