# Good to Know

The CLEF 2026 Conference welcomes papers in the Information Access domain that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. Each submission is reviewed in two stages, see details below.


# Aim and Scope

The CLEF Conference addresses all aspects of Information Access in any modality and language. CLEF consists of the presentation of research papers and a series of workshops presenting the results of lab-based comparative evaluation benchmarks.

CLEF 2026 is the 17th CLEF conference, continuing the popular CLEF campaigns that have run since 2000, contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks.

The CLEF conference has a clear focus on experimental Information Access as carried out within evaluation forums (e.g., CLEF Labs, TREC, NTCIR, FIRE, MediaEval, RomIP, SemEval, and TAC) with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search in different domains, also considering specific classes of users, such as children, students, or impaired users in different tasks (e.g., academic, professional, or everyday life).

We invite paper submissions on significant new insights demonstrated on information access test collections, on the analysis of test collections and evaluation measures, and on concrete proposals to push the boundaries of the Cranfield-style evaluation paradigm.

All submissions to the CLEF main conference will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance, and clarity. CLEF welcomes papers that describe rigorous hypothesis testing regardless of whether the results are positive or negative. CLEF also welcomes past runs, results, data analyses, and new data collections. Methods are expected to be written so that they are reproducible by others, and the logic of the research design should be clearly described in the paper. Linking to additional resources, such as code or data repositories, is encouraged. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).


# Topics

Relevant topics for the CLEF 2026 Conference include, but are not limited to:

- Information access in any language or modality: information retrieval, question answering, recommender systems, image retrieval, search interfaces and design, infrastructures, etc.
- Interactive and conversational search evaluation: the interactive/conversational evaluation of retrieval-augmented generation systems, information retrieval systems using user-centered methods, evaluation of novel search interfaces, novel interactive/conversational evaluation methods, simulation of interaction/conversation, etc.
- Analytics for information access: theoretical and practical results in the analytics field specifically targeted at information access data analyses, data enrichment, etc.
- Reproducibility and replicability: analyses of past results/runs in depth.
- Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics, and Explainability (FATE) in information access.
- Language diversity in information access: work on low-resource languages.
- Models leveraging collaborative and social data, and their evaluation.
User studies, either based on lab studies or crowdsourcing.
- Evaluation initiatives: conclusions, lessons learned, impact, and projections of any evaluation initiative upon completing its cycle.
- Evaluation: methodologies, metrics, statistical and analytical tools, component-based evaluation, user groups and use cases, ground-truth creation, impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences, etc.
- Technology transfer: economic impact/sustainability of information access approaches, deployment and exploitation of systems, use cases, etc.
- Specific application domains: information access and its evaluation in application domains such as cultural heritage, digital libraries, social media, health information, legal documents, patents, news, books, and in the form of text, audio, and/or image data.
- New data collection: presentation of new data collections with potential high impact on future research, specific collections from companies or labs, and multilingual collections.
- Reflections on past achievements and future research directions, roadmaps, outlooks for future developments, and lessons learned.


# Format

Authors are invited to electronically submit original papers, which have not been published and are not under consideration elsewhere, using the LNCS proceedings format (http://www.springer.com/it/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines)

Three categories of papers will be accepted:

- Long research papers: 12 pages plus references for complete research work
- Short research papers: 6 pages plus references for position/discussion papers, new evaluation proposals, developments and applications, etc.
- Past, Present, Future: Up to 12 pages for future directions and research roadmaps, reflections on past achievements, etc.

Papers should be anonymous. Sharing code and data with reviewers should be done via anonymous repositories (such as https://anonymous.4open.science/).


# Review Process for Research Papers

Research papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the programme committee in two stages using a results-blind reviewing process. At the first stage, the members will review the paper's originality, clarity, technical & theoretical soundness, and methodology. At the second stage, the complete manuscripts that passed the first stage will be reviewed. At this stage, reviewers will also look at the reproducibility of the work. The final decision will not be based on whether results are positive or beat a baseline. Therefore, negative results and failed experiments are explicitly welcome.

Authors of long and short papers are asked to submit TWO versions of their manuscript:

1. Methodology version (restricted): This version does NOT report anything related to the results of the study. At this stage, the manuscripts will be evaluated based on the importance of the problem addressed and the soundness of the methodology. Manuscripts can include an introduction, a description of the proposed methodology, and datasets used. However, there should be no section on results and discussion. The authors should also remove any mentions of results from the included sections (e.g., the abstract and introduction).
2. Experimental version (complete): The complete manuscript that contains all the sections of the paper, including the experiments and results.

The submission deadline for both versions is 15 May 2026.

Authors of Past, Present, Future papers are asked to submit to the “Past, Present, Future” track.

The submission deadline for the Past, Present, Future track is 15 May 2026.


# Paper Submission

Papers should be submitted in PDF format at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2026

- Submit the methodology/restricted version to the "Conference - Methodology Part" track.
- Submit the experimental/complete version to the "Conference - Experimental Part" track.
- Submit the Past, Present, Future papers to “Conference - Past, Present, Future” track.
- Submit the best of CLEF 2025 Labs papers to the "Conference - Best of CLEF 2025 Labs" track.


# Best Paper Award

A Best Paper Award will be given to one outstanding conference paper accepted to the conference.This award is sponsored by Springer LNCS and includes a certificate and a prize of €500.


# Organisation

Programme Chairs
- Philipp Schaer, Technische Hochschule Köln, Germany
- Eva Zangerle, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Lab Chairs
- Sean MacAvaney, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
- Julia Maria Struß, Fachhochschule Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, Germany

General Chairs
- Matthias Hagen, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
- Martin Potthast, University of Kassel, hessian.AI, ScaDS.AI, Germany
- Benno Stein, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany