Following the established tradition, an Academic Track running over the days of the FOSS4G Europe (FOSS4GE) is organised. The Scientific Committee of FOSS4GE 2024 invites original research contributions addressing any topic or domain connected to free and open source geospatial software, including (but not limited to): open hardware, open source software development, open geospatial science, open geospatial data (geo)spatial data sharing systems, open (geospatial) cloud platforms and Services, open (geo)education, participatory mapping, Digital Twins, GeoAI and geospatial Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models.

Given the European focus of the conference, authors are encouraged to develop applications and use cases with a European scope and/or driven by European policy initiatives and/or using datasets from prominent European initiatives such as INSPIRE and Copernicus.

All types of papers are welcome, including on results achieved, case studies, work in progress, reviews and demos. We discourage, however, mere presentations of technology or use cases without properly justifying originality against the scientific state of the art and without particular novelty. In addition, the use of open source geospatial software should be properly highlighted. Contributions from PhD students and early-stage researchers are particularly encouraged.

In the evaluation of proposals, the Scientific Committee will pay particular attention to the reproducibility of the research (where this is applicable). Reproducibility is ensured when the research makes all artefacts (input data, computational steps, methods and code) openly available to obtain consistent results. When available, the code shall be publicly released under an open source license.

How to Submit a Paper

The submission procedure is divided in two steps. Note that both steps are mandatory in order for authors to be able to present their work at the FOSS4GE 2024 conference.

Step 1

As a first step, authors are invited to submit abstracts written in English, comprising between 800 and 1000 words and containing sufficient details for evaluation (including the approach, results, concepts, reasons why it should be considered and why it would be interesting for the FOSS4GE Academic Track audience).

The submitted proposals are not publicly visible until the FOSS4G Europe 2024 Scientific Committee has accepted them after a review period. Until then the authors can share their proposal for feedback/proof-reading with colleagues or friends via a link that is automatically created during submission.

The contributions are evaluated in the abstract review process. Submitted abstracts will be refereed by the members of the Scientific Committee for originality/scientific novelty, relevance for the FOSS4G community, presentation/clarity and overall quality.

As in all the fields of science, reproducibility will be considered among the evaluation criteria (see above). Authors will receive feedback and
(for accepted abstracts) suggestions for improvement to be used for preparing their papers, to be submitted in Step 2.

Step 2

If the abstract is accepted, the authors are invited to submit an extended paper that shall include original and unpublished research.

We can accept up to 2 papers per registration. If you choose this option and the two abstracts (for which only one author is registered to the conference) are both accepted, one proposal will be presented through a standard oral presentation and the other one will be presented through a poster or a 5 minutes lightning talk (this will be decided at a later stage). Alternatively (and based on the reviews) they can be both presented through posters or lightning talks. Regardless of the situation (1 oral presentation and 1 poster/lightning talk or 2 posters/lightning talks), the authors have to write two papers for Step 2.

Submitted papers will not be reviewed again, i.e. the acceptance of the content is solely based on the abstract. However, papers will be checked against the conformance to the template (see below) as well as a plagiarism check using specialised software.

Only the work of authors who submitted the extended paper (conformant to the template) will be included (as talks or posters/lightning talks) in the
Academic Track program. In other words, no presentation at the Academic Track is possible without submitting the paper.

The papers will be published in The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, listed in:

• ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) of the Web of Science
• SCOPUS
• E/I Compendex
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

As a reference, see the papers published for the Academic Track of FOSS4G 2023.

Please pay attention that accepted papers will be published only after checking that at least one author is registered to the conference, with the limit of maximum two papers per author (as explained above). The papers will be published online on the first day of the conference at the latest.

All papers should be formatted according to the ISPRS author’s guidelines (template), available here in both LaTeX and DOC versions.