Guardians Conferences on Reproducibility, Validity, and Integrity

Guardians 2026 Call for Reports

Guardians 2026: Dates | CallForReports | Instructions | Program

The BHAVI 2026 October Symposium with title Guardians 2026 Conference will be held as our first hybrid meeting 10:00 - 18:00 BST (British Summer Time, UTC+1) on Friday October 9 at Newcastle University in England. Guardians 2026 remains open to the public in our series of annual Guardians of Truth and Integrity Conferences. There are no registration fees charged for attendance at this symposium held this year both onsite in Newcastle for physical attendees and online via Zoom live stream for virtual attendees at us06web.zoom.us/j/87631631806. Onsite attendees are required to register, while online attendees are encouraged to register. Nonprofit Brain Health Alliance has contributed a prize award fund of $12,000 for best reports presented at Guardians 2026 with $3,000 prize awards in each of 4 categories. There will be no registration, processing or publication fees charged to authors who submit their research reports, which if accepted for presentation at Guardians 2026, will be published in the Brainiacs Journal.

Conference Program

The October 9 online Guardians 2026 asks the same question, Who are the Guardians of Truth and Integrity?, discussed at Guardians 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. Guardians 2026 will focus on the continuing information wars that threaten survival of democracies with the spread of polarized and extremified propaganda and lies, and the now prevalent political use of mis-information, dis-information, anti-information, caco-information, and mal-information. Visit Guardians 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 for previous years' programs of talks, slide presentations, and background references on these information wars. Read the Guardians 2022, 2023 and 2024 summary reports for additional discussion with references. The focus themes of people talking to people with civility, courtesy, tolerance, and respect at Guardians 2024 and scholars listening to scholars with civility, courtesy, tolerance, and respect at Guardians 2025 will be continued this year for Guardians 2026 with a new theme to be announced with our invited speakers. The general theme for technical report submissions by authors who wish to contribute to our annual Guardians conferences series remains reproducibility, validity, and integrity when conducting and communicating research while avoiding common fallacies and pitfalls in the relevant research field.

Call for Presentations and Reports

Research reports contributed to the conference for presentation on October 9 must be submitted no later than September 9, with notice of review decisions announced September 23, and presentation versions of manuscripts re-submitted by September 30 prior to the meeting on October 9. There will be no registration, processing or publication fees charged to authors who submit their research reports, which if accepted for presentation at Guardians 2026, will be published in the Brainiacs Journal. Manuscripts may address any form of research from basic to applied science and medicine, from primary to secondary and tertiary research, from computational and quantitative to non-computational and qualitative, including literature reviews and meta-analyses, and across the entire spectrum of research including "bench-to-bedside" and clinical trials. Without supporting, enabling, and implementing sufficient reproducibility, validity, and integrity, novelty just for the sake of novelty will not be considered an important criterion for selection of manuscripts by the program committee.

Instead, manuscripts will be evaluated for both the quality of the substantive reproducibility, validity, and integrity of their experimental methods, data, and results and also the quality of the written description and report of those methods, data, and results. The program committee will favor those reports which demonstrate use of open software tools and methods, open data and results, rational inferences and conclusions, the presence of valid statistical analyses with hypothesis testing, and the absence of inherent self-contradictions, false equivalences, and other common fallacies in logical reasoning including the correlation/causation fallacy. Review criteria addressing experimental reproducibility and reliability do not apply in a direct manner to those reports considered opinion pieces which contain exclusively commentary and discussion of other published research literature. For these opinion essays, the logical reasoning criteria nevertheless do apply, but the experimental reproducibility and reliability criteria will not be required. Thus, opinion essays can be submitted as commentaries without any new experiments reported with data and results.

Student Best-Paper Awards

Guardians 2026 will offer cash prizes of $3000 for best reports by students in each of the 3 award categories:

For eligibility to compete in the student best-paper competitions, the first (or only) author of the submitted manuscript must be matriculated in a degree-granting educational program, and the manuscript must be accompanied by a letter from the student's mentor attesting to the student's authorship or co-authorship role for both the research conducted and the manuscript written.

FAIR Metrics Grand Challenge Award

Guardians 2026 will offer an additional cash prize of $3000 for the best paper presenting free open source software in response to The Multimedia FAIR Metrics Grand Challenge. For this software competition, there is no student-eligibility requirement. All computational scientists and software engineers interested in responding to this Grand Challenge are welcome to participate.

Important Dates

Visit Guardians 2026 for author instructions and forms for submission of manuscripts contributed in response to our call for reports.