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CALL FOR PAPERS

Elsevier Online Social Networks and Media Journal (OSNEM)

Special issue on
Online/Mobile Social Networking at the time of COVID-19

Submission Deadline: July 31st, 2020
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/online-social-networks-and-media/
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The outbreak of COVID-19 is revolutionising our daily habits and
individual/social behaviour, with many physical activities being "migrated"
to the online world. On the other hand, we are relying more and more on
online services to track and fight the diffusion of the new virus.
While these phenomena are a consequence of an emergency situation,
it is very likely that such changes will have a significant long-term impact.

Online and Mobile Social Networks are a particularly intriguing environment
in this framework. The OSNEM usage has changed dramatically since the emergence
of the pandemic. Moreover, OSNEM can be used to shed light, through big data analysis,
on novel individual and social behaviours of people. Last but not least, OSNEM are
increasingly used to track the pandemic, via Online and Mobile Social Platforms
helping to track physical contacts between people. As the role of OSNEM is becoming
ever more important, challenges and threats to privacy, trust in information,
fake news, malicious behaviour are posing even more serious threats.

This special issue seeks high-quality scientific articles (both theoretical and
experimental) on the use of OSNEM at the time of COVID-19, to either characterise
the human behaviour via large-scale OSNEM data analysis, or using OSNEM to
fight the pandemic. Papers describing the process used to collect and use
large-scale datasets from OSNEM platforms are welcome, provided datasets are
made available to the research community.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Characterisation of OSNEM usage at the time of COVID-19 via OSNEM big data analysis
- Models of individual and social behaviour through OSNEM big data during the pandemic
- Characterisation of social network structures during pandemic via OSNEM large-scale data
- Opinion formation, information diffusion and polarization related to COVID-19
- Tracking of COVID-19 diffusion through Online Social Networks analysis
- Mobile Social Networking applications and services to fight the COVID-19 diffusion
- COVID-19 e-health services based on OSNEM
- Privacy issues in the use of Online and Mobile Social Networks to fight COVID-19
- Tools to detect and counteract disinformation and malicious behaviours
related the COVID-19 phenomena
- Tools to assess and verify trustworthiness of COVID-19 related information and accounts
- OSNEM data-driven approaches to study COVID-19 related phenomena
- Multidisciplinary applications of OSNEM (economics, medicine, society, politics,
homeland security, etc.) to fight COVID-19
- COVID-19 publicly available OSNEM datasets: collection, usage and sharing

Online Social Networks and Media is a multidisciplinary journal for the wide community
of computer and network scientists working on developing OSNEM platforms and services
and using OSNEM as a big data source to mine, learn and model the (online) human behaviour.
Manuscripts only based on questionnaires, even focused on the reported use of social media,
are outside the scope of the journal. On the other hand, the journal welcomes papers which
present analyses based on big data mined from social networks/media.

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Schedule
Manuscript submission deadline: July 31st, 2020
First notification: September 30th, 2020
Submission of revised paper: October 31st, 2020
Notification of acceptance: November 30th, 2020

Guest Editors
Marco Conti, IIT-CNR, Italy
Andrea Passarella, IIT-CNR, Italy
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Instructions for submission

Manuscripts must not have been previously published nor currently under review
by other journals or conferences. Papers previously published in conference proceedings
are eligible for submission if the submitted manuscript is a substantial revision
and extension of the conference version. In this case, authors should indicate
the previous publication(s) in the cover letter and are also required to submit
their published conference article(s) and a summary document explaining the enhancements
made in the journal version. The submission website for this journal is located at
https://www.editorialmanager.com/osnem/default.aspx.

Please select "VSI:COVID-19" when you reach the "Article Type" step in the submission process.
To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified, for consideration by the special issue,
the authors should indicate in the cover letter that the manuscript has been submitted
for the special issue on “Online/Mobile Social Networking at the time of COVID-19”.

Manuscripts can be submitted continuously until the deadline. Once a paper is submitted,
the review process will start immediately. Accepted papers will be published continuously
in the journal (in the first issue available as soon as the paper is accepted).
All accepted papers will be listed together in an online virtual special issue published
in the journal website.

For further information, please contact the guest editors at
osnem at iit.cnr.it