Guardians.BHAVI.us

Guardians 2026 Instructions

Guardians 2026: Dates | CallForReports | Instructions | Program

Scholarly Publishing

Guardians annual conferences on reproducibility, validity, and integrity serve as an example context for the continuing development of the NPDS Cyberinfrastructure with PDP DREAM Software and the PORTAL-DOORS Project applied to metascience, data interoperability, knowledge engineering, bibliometrics, and scholarly research publications and communications. Relevant background references include:

A. Craig et al 2019, DREAM Principles and FAIR Metrics from the PORTAL-DOORS Project for the Semantic Web, DOI 10.1109/ECAI46879.2019.9042003
S. K. Taswell et al 2020, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Scholarly Research Integrity, DOI 10.1002/pra2.223
A. Athreya et al 2020, The Essential Enquiry 'Equal or Equivalent Entities?' About Two Things as Same, Similar, Related, or Different, DOI 10.48085/PEDADC885
S. K. Taswell et al 2021, Truth in Science, DOI 10.48085/M85EC99EE
A. Craig et al 2022, Motivating and Maintaining Ethics, Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Expertise in Peer Review, DOI 10.48085/I5B147D9D
C. Taswell 2022, Epistemic Injustice, Open Access, and Citational Justice, DOI 10.48085/X3B678B7A
C. Taswell 2023, Reproducibility, Validity, and Integrity in Scholarly Research: What Accountability for Willful Disregard?, DOI 10.48085/L3570F30F

Our content management system will remain under continuous development as we build it on the foundation of the NPDS Cyberinfrastructure for use publishing scholarly research reports. If you encounter any bugs in our software, or would like to contribute suggestions, you may report them to Carl Taswell or Adam Craig. Of course, please also contact us for any questions about the Guardians 2026 Conference.

User Accounts

Research scholars who wish to participate in Guardians 2026 as either authors or reviewers should register a user account at Guardians.BHAVI.us. All registered user accounts are assigned user aliases with random alphanumeric characters for the coded alias. Authors and reviewers remain de-identified during the manuscript review process.

Author Reports

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 translational bench-to-bedside projects and clinical trials.
Manuscripts may focus on open source software projects. Reports, analyses, and discussions of open source software projects will not be excluded from Guardians conferences!!!
Literature reviews may be submitted as literature reviews without any new experiments reported with data and results.
Opinion essays may be submitted as opinion essays without any new experiments reported with data and results.
Manuscripts must be submitted with author names de-identified. Authors may use the simple phrase Anonymous Authors or any other preferred pseudonym that anonymizes the identity of the authors.
Manuscripts may be any length from 1 page to 16 pages.
Manuscripts may be submitted in any format but *.pdf files are preferred. If you wish to use a LaTeX template, please use any layout with single-spaced double-column format.
Authors should print and proofread their *.pdf files before submission, especially if the report contains Asian/European language symbols (such as Chinese/Korean characters or English letters with European fonts).
To submit reports, the corresponding author should first create a user account at Register User, complete their user profile at Change Profile, and consent to the author agreement at Add Author Role.
After login to the user account, authors may submit their manuscripts at Submit Report.
Access to the NPDS records for the Guardians2026 diristry will not be made public until after notification of review decisions on September 29.

Reviewer Discussions

Novelty for the sake of novelty — without supporting, enabling, and implementing reproducibility, reliability, validity, and integrity — will not be considered an important criterion for selection of manuscripts by the program committee.
Manuscripts will be evaluated for both the quality of the substantive reproducibility, validity, integrity, and trustworthiness 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 (see discussion in Fallacies and Pitfalls in Genome-Wide Association Studies).
Review criteria addressing experimental reproducibility and validity, 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 validity criteria will not be required.
To submit reviews of author reports, reviewers should create a user account at Register User
After login to the user account, reviewers may submit their discussions of author reports at Submit Discussion.

Mentor Nominations

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

Reproducibility in Science and Medicine
Validity of Data and Algorithms for Knowledge Engineering and Computational Intelligence
Integrity in Scholarly Research and Communications

For eligibility to compete in the student best-report 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 report 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

Wed Sep 9: report website closes for submissions
Wed Sep 16: report website opens for review discussions
Wed Sep 23: authors notified of review decisions
Wed Sep 30: report website closes for presentation versions
Fri Oct 9: author presentations online at Guardians 2026