With the rapid development of network socialization, multimedia social networks (MSNs) have increasingly emerged. These MSNs offer network tools, services, and applications for multimedia contents (e.g. electronic book, digital image, audio and video) that can be shared among users in the same group or between different groups within social networks. Many MSNs are popular nowadays, such as video sharing networks YouTube and audio sharing network SongTaste etc. However, easy digital content reproduction and the convenient distribution and sharing of such contents facilitated by open MSNs environments have enabled people to share and distribute valuable copyrighted digital contents within social networks. The copyright infringement behaviors, such as illicit copying, malicious distribution, unauthorized usage, free sharing of copyright-protected digital contents, will also become a much more common phenomenon. Some research frontiers on media contents security in social networks applications have been in progress, including enhanced security mechanisms, methods and algorithms, trust assessment and risk management in social network applications, as well as social factors and soft computing in social media distributions.
The special issue attempts to bring together researchers, contents industry engineers and administrators resorting to the state-of-the-art technologies and ideas to protect valuable media contents and services against attacks and IP piracy in the emerging social networks. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed and selected on the basis of both their quality and their relevance to the theme of this special issue.
**Submission Guidelines**
This special issue calls for original papers describing the latest developments, trends and solutions of active media technology and its applications. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
1) Preventative cryptography methods for multimedia contents security
2) Reactive watermarking and forensics approaches to multimedia content protection in social networks
3) Social distribution network architecture, modeling and simulation
4) IP, privacy and usage control for Multimedia Social Networks
5) Social computing for multimedia social networks
6) Trust management and trust assessment in social networks
7) Security risk management and soft computing in social network applications
8) Toward social network DRM application cases
Submitted papers should be submitted via The Computer Journal's online submission system, Manuscript Central, at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/compj. They should be accompanied by a cover letter that clearly states that the submission is for the Special Issue on “Security, Trust and Risk in Multimedia Social Networks”.
All submitted papers will be peer reviewed according to the usual standards of this journal, and will be evaluated on the basis of originality, quality and relevance to this Special Issue and the journal, and on the basis of clarity and correct use of English.
The submitted papers should be formatted according to the journal style. For more detailed information concerning the requirements for submission, please refer to the journal homepage at: www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/computer_journal/for_authors/msprep_submission.html
**Important Dates**
Paper submission: Sept. 15, 2013
1st round review notification: Nov. 15, 2013
1st revision due: Dec. 15, 2013
2nd round review notification: Jan. 15, 2014
2nd revision due: Feb. 30, 2014
Final acceptance: Mar. 15, 2014
Publication (tentative): 4th quarter, 2014
**Guest editors**
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zhiyong Zhang (Corresponding GE)
Department of Computer Science, Henan University of Science & Technology, China
School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China
Website: www.sigdrm.org/~zzhang
Email: z.zhang@ieee.org, zerounzhang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Muthucumaru Maheswaran
School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Website: http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~maheswar
Email: maheswar@cs.mcgill.ca