VDOS 2026 Call For Submissions

The 15th International Workshop on Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies will be held along with the 17th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2026), co-located with ISMB 2026 at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. This year, we continue and extend our focus on artificial intelligence's transformative role in drug and vaccine ontology research, with a special emphasis on semantic awareness in the age of generative AI. The workshop explores innovative solutions and challenges in representing and analyzing drugs and vaccines, covering administration, immune responses, adverse events, and more. Key topics include the ontological representation of drugs and vaccines, real-world application challenges, drug components, administration, immune responses, drug interactions, and adverse events in clinical and research settings. A special emphasis will be placed on how AI and large language models can revolutionize ontology studies, enhancing literature mining, meta-analysis, and complex data interpretation. Despite progress, challenges remain in fully representing and utilizing ontologies for research and clinical issues, such as detailed representation of administration and adverse events, drug interactions, and analysis of immune responses. The workshop will bring together experts from clinical, research, and pharma-biotech sectors to discuss solutions to these challenges, aiming to foster advancements in drug development, administration, and the integration of AI in ontological research. Our goal is to contribute to public health improvement by enhancing the understanding and application of drug and vaccine ontologies.

Venue

VDOS 2026 will be held in person at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., co-located with ICBO 2026 and ISMB 2026. Virtual participation options may also be available.

Conference Dates

Journal Paper submission: May 15, 2026 (extended from May 1)
EasyChair (full, short, & abstract) submission: June 1, 2026
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2026

Workshop: TBD (July 2026, on or around July 15-17; Half-day)
Registration: Registration details will be announced soon.

Submission to journal: JBMS (continuous; https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/vdosseries)
Alternatively, submission to EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=vdos2026

We suggest that you submit your papers directly to JBMS if you think your paper meets the journal paper quality. Please follow the JBMS paper submission instructions, and remember to select the JBMS VDOS collection link (Note: the collection is labeled as vdosseries, but it can still be used for vdos2026 submission). Please note that there is no guarantee that the journal submission will be reviewed before the workshop. If the journal submission is not reviewed in a timely manner, the authors may be asked to submit an abstract to EasyChair so that they may still be able to present the paper in the workshop.

If your paper is more preliminary but is suitable for the conference presentation, we suggest you submit it to our EasyChair. For the EasyChair submissions, all selected full-length papers and short papers will be invited to submit a full revised version to the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS) VDOS Special Issue. The conference paper format for EasyChair submission will be the same as the format used in ICBO. Contributions must be delivered non-anonymously and as a single PDF file, following the CEUR-ART template.docx file, single column. There is also an Overleaf Template available here.

Submission Format

For the EasyChair paper submission, we will allow three submission formats:
• full research papers (6-8 pages) format
• work in progress / late-breaking results (2-3 pages), and
• a statement of interest (one page) for podium presentation.

All full-length (6-8 pages) and short-length (2-3 pages) submissions will go through peer reviews by at least two reviewers. The workshop organizers will review the one-page statement-of-interest submissions.

Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS) journal VDOS Collection

As mentioned above, all accepted full-length and selected short papers will be invited to submit a fully revised version to the JBMS VDOS Collection. Alternatively, authors may submit their full-length papers directly to the JBMS VDOS collection at any time (continuous; https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/vdosseries). The JBMS Editorial Office conducts an initial quality check on all submitted manuscripts. The VDOS organizers will then handle the review process and may invite some authors to present at the upcoming VDOS workshop, even if their manuscripts are not accepted for publication. It should be noted that there is no guarantee that submissions to the journal will be reviewed and feedback will be received before the workshop. Submissions made directly to JBMS should adhere to the JBMS guidelines. Please note that JBMS does not impose strict limits on the length and page count of manuscripts.