Frist: 10.12.2025
- December 10, 2025 Paper submission
- February 4, 2026 Notification
- February 28, 2026 Camera-ready versions due
- May 26-29, 2026, Conference dates
Theme for Web Science 2026: Managing Risks in the Era of Generative AI – How 20 Years of Web Science Research can Help
Web content is influencing human experiences more than ever before in history. The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (including large language models) has created new risks for humans in the digital environment. These risks include customly crafted misinformation at scale, realistic AI-generated harmful content and deepfakes, as well as fraudulent activities and scam becoming more effective thanks to AI. Trust and community have been eroded during this current era of the Web and researching means to manage these risks on the Web is as essential as ever. The Web Science community has looked at this complex socio-technical system for 20 years, exploring its structure, dynamics, and impact on society. This year’s conference especially encourages contributions investigating the risks for society on the web in the presence of artificial intelligence. Additionally, we welcome papers on a wide range of topics at the heart of Web Science.
In 2026, we will also be able to allocate a limited amount of funding for student travel provided by SIGWEB and WebIST. See SIGWEB Fair Access Grant
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Understanding the Web
- Trends in globalization and fragmentation of the Web
- The architecture, philosophy, and evolution of the Web
- Automation and AI in all its manifestations relevant to the Web
- The interrelationship between the structure of the web and social behavior
- Critical analyses of the Web and Web technologies
- The Spread of Large Models on the Web
Making the Web Inclusive
- Issues of discrimination and fairness
- Intersectionality and design justice in questions of marginalization and inequality
- Ethical challenges of technologies, data, algorithms, platforms, and people on the Web
- Safeguarding and governance of the Web, including anonymity, security, and trust
- Inclusion, literacy and the digital divide
- Human-centered security and robustness on the Web
The Web and Everyday Life
- Social machines, crowd computing, and collective intelligence
- Web economics, social entrepreneurship, and innovation
- Legal and policy issues, including rights and accountability for the AI industry
- The creator economy: Humanities, arts, and culture on the Web
- Politics and social activism on the Web
- Relationships, organization, and social interaction on the Web
- Online education and remote learning
- Health and well-being online
- Social presence in online professional event spaces
- The Web as a source of news and information
Doing Web Science
- Data curation, Web archives and stewardship in Web Science
- Temporal and spatial dimensions of the Web as a repository of information
- Analysis and modeling of human and automatic behavior (e.g., bots)
- Analysis of online social and information networks
- Detecting, preventing, and predicting anomalies in Web data (e.g., fake content, spam)
- Novel analysis techniques for Web and social network analysis
- Recommendation engines and contextual adaptation for Web tasks
- Web-based information retrieval and information generation
- Supporting heterogeneity across modalities, sensors, and channels on the Web.
- User modeling and personalization approaches on the Web.
Format of the submissions
Please upload your submissions via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=websci26
There are two submission formats:
- Full paper should be between 6 and 10 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Full papers typically report on mature and completed projects.
- Short papers should be up to 5 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Short papers will primarily report on high-quality ongoing work not mature enough for a full-length publication.
