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Call for Papers

(available as PDF)

    In 2022, the 18th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS) and the 18th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym) are joining forces and will be held as co-located events.

    The goal of bringing these two communities together is to make it a holistic forum encompassing all topics related to open collaboration research and practice, including open source, open data, open science, open education, wikis, and related social media, Wikipedia, and IT-driven open innovation research.

    Open collaboration emerged as one of the most important phenomena in the last decades. More recently, we saw how this global openness helped to respond to an international crisis, the Covid-19 crisis. Researchers from all over the world gathered efforts to find how to manage the pandemic. Synergies have been created, data opened and shared, knowledge disseminated, in order to accelerate research on vaccines and understand the virus behavior.

    Following this historical situation, we decided to put this edition under the theme:

“Openness in Emergency Situations”

    Open science is at the heart of this theme, including open data and open source tools that enabled this large-scale collaboration. We are interested in understanding cases and research that explore questions like: How "open" can benefit the society in emergency situations? What are the risks assigned to it? What are the processes, tools, and methods implemented to support openness?

    More broadly, this year more than ever, our conference is about collaborations between people from computer science, information science, management, social science, humanities, and everyone interested in open collaboration and how it is helping and changing the world.

How will the CFP and Proceedings work?

    While we will have a shared program, a single theme, and the same deadlines, we will keep two separate proceedings. The goal is to keep the specifics of each of the communities in terms of archive and history. Therefore, formatting details and topics of interest are individual to each conference/symposium.

    The intersection point between these two communities is the topics related to Open Source Software. Therefore, we encourage the authors of papers that touch this specific topic to submit to the OSS Conference.

What are the topics of interest?

    Submitted papers should present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new work: theoretical, empirical, and/or in the design, development, and/or deployment of novel concepts, systems, and mechanisms. Research papers will be reviewed to meet rigorous academic standards of publication. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, conceptual quality, innovation, and clarity of presentation.

    OSS and OpenSym 2022 will follow their traditions and will cover and welcome topics that are appealing to the advances in their areas of interest. Although we will have a focus on “Openness in Emergency Situations”, all traditional topics will be covered and welcome. For each of the events, a non-comprehensive list of topics of interest is presented below:


OSS 2022


  • Business models for FLOSS
  • Cost and quality models for FLOSS
  • Diversity in FLOSS communities
  • Documentation of FLOSS
  • Empirical analysis of FLOSS development artifacts
  • FLOSS and agile methodologies
  • FLOSS in DevOps workflows
  • FLOSS and E-government
  • FLOSS case studies and experiments
  • FLOSS education and training
  • FLOSS in large organizations and public administrations
  • FLOSS in the wider Open* ecosystem: Open Culture, Open Data, Open Hardware
  • FLOSS licensing
  • FLOSS projects and communities
  • Foundations and rationale of FLOSS
  • Human factors in FLOSS
  • Impact of FLOSS on collaboration and peer production
  • Knowledge management in FLOSS
  • Legal issues and policies in FLOSS
  • Migrations from proprietary to FLOSS systems
  • Remote collaboration on FLOSS projects and using FLOSS tools
  • Software health in FLOSS systems and communities
  • Tools and methodologies for FLOSS development and management
  • FLOSS Robotics
  • Open Source Program Office Experiences

OpenSym 2022


    Wikipedia and Wikimedia Research
  • Participation in Wikimedia communities
  • Group Dynamics and Organization
  • Readership/Engagement on Wikipedia
  • Technical Infrastructure and Design in Wikimedia projects
  • Evaluating Content of Wikimedia projects
  • Knowledge Diffusion, Outreach, and Generalization
    Open Collaboration Research, esp. Wikis and Social Media
  • Novel open collaboration technologies
  • Wikis in organization and academia
  • Online collaboration using social media (e.g., Wikis, Blogs, Twitter)
  • Theoretical work on open collaboration
  • Digital divides and open collaboration
    Open Data and Open Science
  • Open data quality, standards, measures, and metrics
  • Open data and open science methods, applications and prototypes
  • Best practices and case studies for Open Data and Open Science
    Open Education
  • Tools and methods for managing, storing and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Open online learning environments such as MOOCs
  • Connecting formal and informal learning
  • Supporting self-paced learning and co-construction of knowledge
  • Development of new knowledge or products (e.g. Maker Spaces), collecting data (e.g. Citizen Science) or discussing political topics (e.g. e-participation).
    Open Innovation
  • Architecture and design of open innovation systems
  • The role of IT-artefacts in open and collaborative innovation activities
  • Implementation of open innovation platforms in corporate IT landscapes
  • IT security, intellectual property and personal anonymity in open innovation
  • Best practices and case studies of open data, open standards
  • Open innovation and GLAM
    Open Policy/Open Government
  • Open policy formulation and design
  • Implications of open policies for governments
  • Implementation of open policies
  • Measuring the impact of open policies
  • Best practices and cases studies of open policy/government
  • Openness in public initiatives (e.g. Smart Cities, Internet of Things)
    Open Standards
  • Communities for development, maintenance, use, and implementation of open standards
  • Implications of open standards for governments and other organizations
  • Open standards development processes
  • Open standards and licensing aspects

What is the submission process and format?

    This year we will have a different, more inclusive, submission flow. We will offer the authors the opportunity to receive feedback based on extended abstracts. When submitting the extended abstract, please inform after the title of the paper (in the manuscript) if this refers to a potential full research paper, a new ideas paper, or (in the case of OSS only) a tool paper.

    The papers accepted as extended abstracts will be invited to submit a full version of their paper which will be further reviewed. However, the authors who do not want to submit their full or new ideas paper (or have them rejected) will have the papers considered as part of the program as well.

    We summarize this new process in the figure below:

Process description

    For the extended abstracts, the following structure is recommended:

  • Motivation: including the problem tackled in the paper, justification of the importance of the problem, positioning among the main related work/previous research;
  • Aim: Highlight the research objectives, hypotheses, and/or research questions
  • Method: details about the method followed to conduct the research
  • Results: a summary of the results achieved in the study
  • Conclusion (impact): a brief discussion to conclude the paper, focusing on presenting how your findings move the state-of-the-art, showing the contribution of the paper/ highlighting the implications.

    The extended abstracts maximum length is of 1,000 words. References do not count in the 1000 words limit, but the number of references is limited to 10. You may also have at most 2 graphic elements (table/figure). It is important to use the format of the conference you are submitting your extended abstract, as follows:

  • OpenSym: must be in English and conform to the ACM submission template (conference, in the new single-column format).
  • OSS Conference: must be in English and conform to Springer’s guidelines for Computer Science proceedings.

    All submissions must present original work, unpublished, and not under submission elsewhere. The authors must clearly explain the contribution of the work in terms of its theoretical and/or practical value and situate it in relation to previous work. The review process for both events is double-blind, so manuscripts must be anonymized.

    Papers should be submitted as PDF files at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=opensymandoss2022, choosing which track you are submitting: OSS or OpenSym. All accepted submissions will be included in their respective conference proceedings—OSS is published by Springer . The open-access preprints of all accepted submissions will be collected and referenced from the conference website.

    Authors whose submitted papers have been accepted for presentation at the conference have a choice of

  • having their paper become part of the official conference proceedings;
  • having no publication record at all but only the presentation at the conference.

OpenSym

    This is only required after acceptance of your Extended Abstract. Please look at the previous section.

    Submissions to OpenSym must be in English and conform to the ACM submission template (conference, in the new single-column format). All the submissions will be reviewed in a double-blinded process.

  • Research papers: Submissions describing original research in the area of Open Collaboration. Research papers that discuss actionable insights resulting from the presented results will be particularly welcome. Research papers are expected to describe new methodologies and/or provide novel research results and should be evaluated scientifically.
  • New Ideas and Emerging Research may contain innovative research and current work in progress. New ideas should present new directions well supported with a solid research plan, which can provide benefit for the community. Emerging Research papers should present initial and preliminary results with a non-complete evaluation in order to collect early feedback from the community.
  • We will also have an Industry Track. More details to come soon.

    Submissions must not exceed the page limit (15 pages plus 2 additional pages of references for research papers; 8 pages plus 1 additional page of references for New Ideas and Emerging Research papers). The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).

    Furthermore, we plan to have a Journal Article Collection, to which the best research papers in the conference will be invited to submit an extended version.

OSS

    This is only required after acceptance of your Extended Abstract. Please look at the previous section.

    Submissions to the OSS Conference must be in English and conform to Springer’s guidelines for Computer Science proceedings. All the submissions will be reviewed in a double-blinded process.

    OSS conference will accept three kinds of submissions:

  • Research papers: Submissions describing original research in the area of FLOSS systems. Research papers that discuss actionable insights resulting from the presented results will be particularly welcome. Research papers are expected to describe new methodologies and/or provide novel research results and will be evaluated scientifically.
  • New Ideas and Emerging Research: New Ideas papers may contain innovative research and current work in progress. New ideas should present new directions well supported with a solid research plan, which can provide benefit for the community. Emerging Research papers should present initial and preliminary results with a non-complete evaluation in order to collect early feedback from the community.
  • Tool papers: Submissions describing the novel release or original development of software applications, libraries, frameworks, or other FLOSS tools that have a significant user base or have been used to achieve significant practical results. Tool papers are expected to include a validation section showing the usefulness of the presented tools.
  • We will also have an Industry Track. More details to come soon.

    Submissions must not exceed the page limit (15 pages plus 2 additional pages of references for research papers; 8 pages plus 1 additional page of references for New Ideas and Emerging Research papers). The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).

    Furthermore, we plan to have a Journal Article Collection, to which the best research papers in the conference will be invited to submit an extended version.

Important Dates

    Extended abstract submission: May 6 May 16, 2022 (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)

    Notification of extended abstract acceptance: May 24 May 31, 2022

    Paper submission: June 18 June 24, 2022 (Anywhere on Earth, UTC-12)

    Author notification: July 18, 2022

    Camera ready submission: August 1st July 24, 2022 (for OSS 2022 papers to meet a Springer deadline)