Call for Papers

RECOMB-Privacy 2026 Call for Papers

The 3rd RECOMB Satellite Conference on Biomedical Data Privacy (RECOMB-Privacy 2026) will be held on May 25th, 2026 in Thessaloniki, Greece just before the main RECOMB conference. The conference brings together leading researchers in computational biology and medicine to explore algorithmic solutions addressing critical ethical challenges in biomedical research related to data privacy and security.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Privacy attacks and risk identification: Examining privacy risks (e.g., re-identification) associated with biological or other health-related data, such as genomes, molecular profiles, and clinical data.
  • Frameworks for balancing privacy and utility: Designing frameworks that balance the need to safeguard privacy with the goal of enabling scientific progress.
  • Secure computation algorithms: Methods for analyzing sensitive biomedical data while preserving privacy via cryptography or other related techniques.
  • Privacy-preserving data release: Methods for releasing private datasets while minimizing risks to individuals.
  • Trustworthy system design: Techniques for enhancing trust in secure biomedical data ecosystems (e.g., verifiable computation).
  • Incentive mechanisms: Frameworks for aligning the interests of various stakeholders in biomedicine to promote secure data sharing.
  • Privacy-preserving machine learning: Methods that enable training, evaluation, and deployment of machine learning models on sensitive biomedical data while preserving individual privacy and/or model security.
  • Privacy evaluation and benchmarking: Metrics, benchmarks, and experimental methods for evaluating privacy risks, utility loss, and robustness of techniques in biomedical settings.
  • Human factors and usability: Understanding how researchers, clinicians, and patients interact with privacy-preserving systems, and designing usable interfaces.
  • Applied cryptography for biomedicine: Advances in cryptographic techniques and protocols tailored to biomedical and health data settings, addressing tasks such as secure data storage and access, identity and consent management, key management, secure aggregation, and other real-world biomedical workflows.

Key Dates

Proceedings and Overlay Tracks:

  • Submission deadline: March 9th, 2026 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)
  • Author notification: March 27th, 2026

Highlights / Short Talks / Posters:

  • Abstract submission deadline: April 6th, 2026 23:59 AoE
  • Author notification: April 13th, 2026

Tracks

We solicit contributions in three categories (“Tracks”) as follows.

Proceedings Track

Manuscripts in this track will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Biology. At the time of submission, and for the entire review period, the work should not be under review by any other conference or scientific journal. In some rare cases, manuscripts may be deemed to not be suitable for the journal after review but still be invited for an oral presentation at the conference. Authors will be required to upload their manuscript to a public preprint server (bioRxiv, arXiv, etc.) prior to the conference.

To indicate that your submission should be considered for the proceedings track, please include “[Proceedings]” at the end of the paper title.

Overlay Track

Manuscripts submitted to this track will be reviewed by the program committee, and selected submissions will be invited for oral presentations. At the time of submission, the manuscript should be publicly available on a preprint server (e.g., bioRxiv, arXiv). While there are no specific formatting requirements, the manuscript should be structured to highlight its methodological contributions. Authors are encouraged to keep their manuscripts within a similar length to those submitted for the proceedings track. Manuscripts may be under review elsewhere but must not be published or in press at the time of submission. Manuscripts already in press or published may instead be submitted as an abstract for the Highlights track.

To indicate that your submission should be considered for the overlay track, please include “[Overlay]” at the end of the paper title.

Abstracts for Highlights, Short Talks, or Posters

Abstracts describing original work will be considered for short oral presentations or posters. Authors should submit a 1-2 page abstract outlining the methods and key results via the EasyChair system. Submissions may describe work that is either recently published or still in progress.

Paper and Abstract Submission Procedures

Manuscripts for the Proceedings Track should not exceed 10 pages using at least 10 point font on U.S. standard 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper with no less than one inch margin all around. This excludes the cover page and references. The cover page should have the title and the corresponding author’s email address. An optional short appendix can be included if necessary but reading it will be at the discretion of the program committee. Manuscripts must be submitted electronically in PDF format via the EasyChair system.

In EasyChair, please select “RECOMB-Privacy 2026” track within RECOMB conference at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=recomb2026

An author of each accepted paper or abstract is expected to attend the conference in person to present the work.

Special handling of papers submitted to RECOMB 2026

If your paper was not selected by RECOMB 2026 and you wish to submit it to RECOMB-Privacy, you have the option to transfer your reviews. To do so, please submit a single combined PDF that includes the reviews from RECOMB, followed by a rebuttal addressing the concerns raised. The manuscript should be revised according to the reviews or include an explanation of why revisions were not made. All reviews will be treated confidentially and will only be accessible to the program committee members. Authors may also submit their papers to RECOMB-Privacy without transferring their reviews, if they prefer.