FOSS4G Europe 2025 Academic Track

Following the established tradition, an Academic Track running over the days of the FOSS4G Europe (FOSS4GE) is organised. The Academic Track is organised by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), in particular the ISPRS Intercommission Working Group IV/III/II Openness in Geospatial Science and Remote Sensing. The Scientific Committee of FOSS4GE 2025 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 and big data analysis
  • GIS for real-time applications, disaster response and recovery
  • geospatial health informatics
  • open (geospatial) cloud computing and cybersecurity
  • open (geo)education
  • participatory mapping and crowdsourcing
  • Digital Twins, urban analytics, sustainable urban planning and development
  • GeoAI and geospatial Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models
  • Remote Sensing for water resources management, biodiversity and ecosystem services

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 results achieved, case studies, work in progress, reviews and demos. However, mere presentations of technology or applications using open source software without properly justifying originality against the scientific state of the art and without particular novelty are outside the scope of the Academic Track and will be rejected. In addition, the use of open source geospatial software and its impact on the work 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 into two steps. Note that both steps are mandatory in order for authors to be able to present their work at the FOSS4GE conference.

Step 1

Deadline 3 March 2025

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 2025 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 scientific value.

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

Deadline 17 May 2025

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 registered person. 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) both can be 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 checked for a plagiarism check using specialised software. Papers (and as a consequence, the related presentations/posters at the conference) can still be rejected if authors fail to conform to the template.

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 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 Europe 2024.

Please note that accepted papers will be published only after checking that at least one author is registered to the conference, with a limit of a maximum of 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.