About the Web Science Conference

Web Science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by incorporating various scientific approaches. We welcome quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research, including techniques from the social sciences and computer science. In addition, we are interested in work exploring Web-based data collection and research ethics. We also encourage studies that combine analyses of Web data and other types of data (e.g., from surveys or interviews) to help better understand user behavior online and offline.

2025 Emphasis: Maintaining a human-centric web in the era of Generative AI 

Web-based experiences are more deeply integrated into human experiences than ever before in history. However, the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (including large language models) has drastically shifted the interactions between humans in the digital environment. The Web has never been more productive, but the integrity of human connection has been compromised. Trust and community have been eroded during this current era of the Web and researching alternative aspects of life on the Web is as essential as ever. Bots, deepfakes, and sophisticated cyberattacks are proliferating rapidly while people increasingly navigate the Web for news, social interaction, and learning. This year’s conference especially encourages contributions investigating how humans are reconfiguring their Web-based engagements in the presence of artificial intelligence. Additionally, we welcome papers on a wide range of topics at the heart of Web Science.

Possible topics across methodological approaches and digital contexts 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
• 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
• 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=websci25 

There are two submission formats:

1. Full paper should be between 6 and 10 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Full papers typically report on mature and completed projects.
2. 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.

All papers should adopt the current ACM SIG Conference proceedings template (acmart.cls). Please submit papers as PDF files using the ACM template, either in Microsoft Word format (available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template under “Word Authors”) or with the ACM LaTeX template on the Overleaf platform which is available https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty. In particular, please ensure that you are using the two-column version of the appropriate template.

All contributions will be judged by the Program Committee upon rigorous peer review standards for quality and fit for the conference, by at least three referees. Additionally, each paper will be assigned to a Senior Program Committee member to ensure review quality.

WebSci-2025 review is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission: do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review. References to authors’ own prior relevant work should be included, but should not specify that this is the authors’ own work. It is up to the authors’ discretion how much to further modify the body of the paper to preserve anonymity. The requirement for anonymity does not extend outside the review process, e.g. the authors can decide how widely to distribute their papers over the Internet. Even in cases where the author’s identity is known to a reviewer, the double-blind process will serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance of evaluating the submitted work on its own merits without regard to the authors’ reputation.

For authors who wish to opt-out of publication proceedings, this option will be made available upon acceptance. This will encourage the participation of researchers from the social sciences that prefer to publish their work as journal articles. All authors of accepted papers (including those who opt out of proceedings) are expected to present their work at the conference.

ACM Publication Policies 

1. By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

2. Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.  ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start, and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors.  The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022.  We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Program Committee Chairs:

• Sarah Rajtmajer (Penn State University)
• Vivek Singh (Rutgers University)
• Marlon Twyman (University of Southern California)
• Fred Morstatter (University of Southern California)

 For any questions and queries regarding the paper submission, please contact the chairs at websci25@easychair.org