The Call for Lightning Talks is now open for the 2011 conference on Informatics for Phylogenetics, Evolution, and Biodiversity (iEvoBio), at http://ievobio.org/ocs/index.php/ievobio/2011. 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 afternoon program 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 consist of a title and an abstract at most 1 page long. 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 (June 21). Note that the number of lightning talk slots is finite, and given the high volume of submissions we experienced for full talks, the Lightning Talks 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 (closed), 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) , and information on the Software Bazaar and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions is forthcoming.

More details about the program and guidelines for contributing content are available at http://ievobio.org. You can also find continuous updates on the conference's Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/iEvoBio.

iEvoBio is sponsored by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in partnership with the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB). Additional support has been provided by the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

The iEvoBio 2011 Organizing Committee: Rob Guralnick (University of Colorado at Boulder) (co-Chair) Cynthia Parr (Encyclopedia of Life) (co-Chair) Dawn Field (UK National Environmental Research Center) Mark Holder (University of Kansas) Hilmar Lapp (NESCent) Rod Page (University of Glasgow)

(*) 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.