Call for Papers

The 17th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2026) is the flagship conference of ACM SIGBio. It will move for the first time to Europe and will be held in Calabria, Italy from June 30 to July 3, 2026. The conference aims to promote big data, AI and algorithms for health and biomedicine including cutting-edge advances in computational biology, bioinformatics, and health informatics, at the intersection of computer science, biology, health and medicine. The conference will be hosted at University of Calabria Congress Center. The conference will be hosted at the University of Calabria Congress Center. Please visit the conference website for details: https://acm-bcb.org.

This year for the first time, ACM BCB submitted papers will go through a two phase review process aiming to publish accepted papers in a ACM new journal format. By the two phase review process, authors can refine their work based on constructive critiques from reviewers. The updated paper version can thus be considered in a second phase review process. Accepted papers will then be included in a new journal published by ACM. The journal will be indexed by Scopus, WOS and DBLP.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to)

• Haplotypes and Population Genomics
• Computational Drug Discovery
• Multi-omics Integration and Analysis
• Genomic Variation and Disease
• Phylogenetics
• Protein Analysis, Structure, and Dynamics
• Biomedical Imaging Analysis and Informatics
• Metagenomics and Microbiomes
• Pharmacogenomics
• Biological Networks and Systems Biology
• Biomedical Knowledge Graphs
• AI and Machine Learning in Biology, Medicine, and Healthcare
• Explainable AI and AI Interpretability
• Trustworthy AI and Agentic AI
• Natural Language Processing for Biomedicine and Health
• Large Language Model (LLM) for Biomedicine and Health
• Semantic Representation of LLMs
• Harmonization of Multimodal Health Data
• Health Data Space, Ontologies and Standards
• Computational Phenotyping
• Multimodality Biomedical Data Analysis
• Biomedical and Health Data Visualization
• Wearable Sensor Informatics
• Computational Epidemiology
• Computer-Assisted Diagnosis and Recommendation System
• Security and Privacy of Biomedical and Health Data
• Social Media Analysis for Healthcare

Important Dates: (all submissions close at 11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth [AOE])

• Regular paper abstract by: February 20, 2026
• Full regular paper submissions by: February 27, 2026
• First round of reviews by: April 1, 2026
• First round author response due: April 15, 2026
• Conditional acceptance notification: April 27, 2026
• Second round author response due: May 4, 2026
• Final acceptance notification: May 19, 2026
• Camera-ready by: May 30, 2026

ACM Publications Policies

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM's new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Submission Guidelines:

The ACM-BCB 2026 Conference invites original submissions not published, nor currently under review elsewhere. Authors can submit regular papers of 8-10 pages, including references, formatted in the double-column ACM SIG conference format. While the authors are allowed to include appendices (or supplementary information) beyond the page limit, please note that it is up to the reviewer whether the additional material will be considered in the overall evaluation. Manuscripts should comply with the requirements delineated on the ACM Master Article Template website.

Please submit your papers through Open Review. Submissions will be evaluated by the ACM-BCB 2026 Technical Program Committee based on originality, technical soundness, significance, clarity of presentation, and relevance to the conference audience.

There is a mandatory abstract submission deadline (see Important Dates). This step allows the Technical Program Committee to begin assigning reviewers in advance of the full paper deadline. After the abstract deadline, new submissions will not be accepted; however, authors may continue to revise their full paper until the final paper deadline. Please ensure the abstract registration closely aligns with full paper submission in terms of title, author list, and abstract content. "Placeholder" abstract registrations without meaningful descriptions may be desk-rejected. While minor edits to the abstract are allowed before the full paper submission deadline, any substantial changes to the title or abstract content risk being removed without consideration. The author list should be final at the time of full paper submission, and any subsequent changes to the author list post-submission must be approved by the Program Chairs.

ACM-BCB 2026 will follow a double-blind review process: reviewers will not have access to author identities, and authors will not know the identities of their reviewers. Authors should write their submissions in a way that does not reveal their identity or affiliation. This includes referring to their own prior work in the third person, and avoiding acknowledgments, grant numbers, or links to personal or institutional GitHub repositories. If code is included in the submission, it must also be anonymized. Authors may use services such as Anonymous GitHub (https://anonymous.4open.science/) to share code while preserving anonymity.

Submission is permitted for work that has previously appeared as a preprint or technical report. However, to maintain anonymity, we recommend not citing the preprint in the submission. While reviewers may independently come across such public versions, their availability does not constitute a violation of the double-blind policy. Reviewers are explicitly instructed not to actively seek out author identities through external sources.

Accepted papers will be published in a new ACM journal and indexed by ACM Digital Library and all the main indexing platforms. In 2025, 33 regular and 32 short papers out of 170 submissions were published in the ACM digital library. Additionally, a separate Highlights Track is for authors who wish to share their recent journal articles, and Posters with Rapid FIRE are for those who will share recent research progress.

All information related to submitted manuscripts will be treated as confidential throughout the review process. Program committee members (i.e., Program Chairs, Area Chairs, Reviewers) are requested to disclose any conflicts of interest through OpenReview. A committee member will be considered conflicted if they have close professional or personal ties to any of the authors (e.g., recent collaboration, same institution, advisor/advisee relationship). Conflicted committee members will not participate in the review, discussion, or decision-making process for any paper with which they have a conflict. In cases where a Program Chair has a conflict of interest with a submission, all decisions related to that paper will be made independently by the other, non-conflicted Program Chair(s), without input from the conflicted individual.