Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Call for Papers: Special Issue on Big Data in Healthcare and Biomedical Research Questions Regarding the Issue Please direct any questions regarding the special issue or submissions to Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado (machado@ucsd.edu) Motivation The collection, annotation, organization, integration, analysis, interpretation, governance, and sharing of big, complex, and sensitive data from healthcare and biomedical research has recently become the emphasis of several government initiatives in the USA and abroad. While the informatics community has been dealing with many of these issues for several years, the dissemination of new approaches and solutions may be scattered in several different journals, conference proceedings, and web sites. The purpose of this special focus issue is to publish the most innovative approaches and solutions (through Research and Applications articles, Brief Communications, and Case Reports), and place them in context of the work that has been previously published (through Reviews and Perspectives). User-friendly Tutorials that help non-specialists better understand the methods commonly used in machine and statistical learning, as well as in large scale integrative approaches related to common data models, ontologies and standards are also welcome. Topics of Interest Possible topics include, but are not limited to: - Scalable systems for data integration across sites - Large scale standards-based representation and modeling of data and algorithms - Information retrieval that combines the biomedical literature and patient data sources - Collaborative filtering - Adaptive learning - Distributed multiparty computation and large scale distributed data annotation - High performance computing and parallel processing - Novel inferential statistics and machine learning algorithms - Evaluation strategies - Ethical, social, and legal considerations - Analyses of big data from EHRs, genomes, proteomes, images, social media, patient reports, etc. Authors should make sure to place their work in the context of biomedical research or healthcare, and to carefully review the relevant literature. Research & Applications articles, Case Studies, and Brief Communications should describe clear evaluation strategies and quantitative or qualitative results, and discuss how results could be generalized to other settings. Preference will be given to systematic Reviews. Perspectives should provide consensus of a group of experts who are highly experienced in the topic, and should demonstrate command of the existing literature, particularly recent literature whose synthesis would be new to our readers. Open-source software code and data should be submitted, as well as data when appropriate. Important Dates May 31, 2013 Manuscript submission deadline July 31, 2013 (expected) Initial decisions sent to authors August 31, 2013 (expected) Revised manuscript submission deadline September 30, 2013 (expected) Final decisions sent to authors Submission and Peer Review Process To ensure consideration in the special issue, authors should note in a cover letter that their submission is for the “Special Issue on Big Data”. Detailed information for online submission to JAMIA is available via http://jamia.bmj.com. All manuscripts will be subject to the rigorous JAMIA peer-review process. Manuscripts that are considered within scope and meet quality expectations will be typically reviewed by two experts for scientific merit. Assistance of a native English speaker is highly recommended prior to submission. Authors should format and structure their manuscripts according to the guidelines specified at: http://jamia.bmj.com/site/about/guidelines.xhtml. Accepted articles may appear in print or in an online JAMIA issue.