Research Track Call for Papers

ICWE 2026 – AT A GLANCE

The International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) is the premier annual conference on Web Engineering and associated technologies. It covers different aspects of Web Engineering, including the design, creation, maintenance, operation, and usage of Web applications. 

ICWE aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines in academia and industry to tackle the emerging challenges in the engineering of Web applications, the problems and opportunities of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. 

Following the ongoing discussion about the role of artificial intelligence in all aspects of computer science, this year we invite the ICWE community to reflect and submit their work on the following theme:

Agentic & Autonomous Web: Design, Trust, Accessibility, Sustainability, and Performance

We solicit submissions showing how to design web systems not just for humans but for and in collaboration with autonomous agents. We encourage the discussion on how to balance trust and security, as well as vision and ideas on how agents can make web engineering more sustainable and accessible. For instance, submissions may address the environmental impact of web technologies and discuss how emerging AI-assisted coding paradigms (i.e., vibe coding) may open to a less technical audience. Last but not least, we welcome works discussing the support of AI to web engineering in performance-critical environments (e.g., edge-cloud continuum).

ICWE 2026 solicits submissions on a wide spectrum of Web Engineering topics, such as, among others:

• Safety, Inclusivity, and accessibility for the Web
• Fair and explainable web technologies
• Human-Centered vs. More-than-Human web
• Conversational web
• Fake news, misinformation, and online toxicity
• Web security, identity, trust and privacy engineering
• Participatory and deliberative web
• Web application modeling and engineering
• Web infrastructures and architectures
• Web of things, social web and mobile web applications
• Web mining, knowledge extraction and analytics of big data on the Web
• Machine learning, AI and large-language models for web engineering
• Web user interfaces and UX
• User modeling and web-based recommender systems
• Quality aspects of web applications
• Performance, scalability, energy-efficiency and sustainability aspects of web applications
• Semantic web, knowledge graphs, web ontologies, and linked open-data applications
• Web crowdsourcing and human computation
• Web composition and mashups
• Web services, Microservice architecture, computing, workflows, and standards
• Architecting the Web in the cloud continuum, e.g. cloud, fog, edge and server-less computing for Web applications
• Web engineering processes, practices, experience and paradigms, e.g. Agile, Lean
• Re-decentralization of the web
• Web standards and disruptive web technologies
• Comparisons, data sets, empirical studies of web technologies
• Web programming languages, tools and frameworks

Theme-specific topics:

• Web engineering and sustainability
• Autonomous agents for web engineering
• Vibe-coding for web engineering
• High-performance web engineering 

In addition to the research track, ICWE 2026 also seeks contributions of industrial papers, demos and posters, student papers at the PhD Symposium, tutorials, and workshops, which will be the subject of individual calls.

SUBMISSIONS TO THE RESEARCH TRACK

This call addresses research contributions in one of the following two categories:

– Full papers (15 pages, Springer LNCS format): mature, original research contributions. Reported results must be supported by some type of evaluation, and also include a justification about the choice/suitability of the evaluation method. In addition, evidence of use in practice and/or demonstration of scalability is regarded as a plus. Resources and artefact papers, showcasing an open-source (explicit License) datasets, library, or else are also welcome. Resources should have a permanent identifier, and include a sustainability plan for the medium term in the submission.

– New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) papers (8 pages, Springer LNCS format): short papers exploring bold hypotheses, unconventional methodologies, and interdisciplinary perspectives about relevant aspects of Web Engineering. Submissions aim to foster discussions that challenge the status quo and open new avenues for exploration that promise potential for research that will impact Web Engineering in the coming years.

Papers must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS authors instructions available at https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines, and must be submitted in PDF format through the ICWE 2026 EasyChair web page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icwe2026.

Papers submitted to ICWE 2026 must not be under review elsewhere while under consideration for ICWE 2026, nor may have been already previously published elsewhere. Manuscripts that are not in compliance with the required submission format, stated page limits, or that are out of the scope of the conference will be desk rejected without review. 

We strongly encourage authors to facilitate replication of their research in order to increase visibility, reproducibility, and impact by making relevant artifacts (data, source code, etc.) available for reviewers and readers.

Upon acceptance, one corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form, through which the copyright for their paper is transferred to Springer. Then, at least one author of each accepted submission must register for the conference and present the work during the corresponding session in person. 

Accepted contributions will be included in the ICWE 2026 Springer LNCS proceedings. Selected papers, including the best papers, will be invited to submit extended versions to a special issue of the Journal of Web Engineering (https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JWE/).

USE OF GENERATIVE AI

Authors should explicitly disclose the use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in their manuscripts when these tools are employed for more than just editing the author’s text. This disclosure can be made through a statement placed at the end of the manuscript, preceding the References section.

If it comes to our notice that a submission utilizes large language models (LLMs) without clear disclosure, such papers will be subject to immediate desk rejection. However, if there is no usage of such technologies, no disclosure statement is required.

SPRINGER BEST-PAPER AWARD SPONSORSHIP 

Springer will sponsor the ICWE 2026 Best Paper Award which will be announced during the ICWE 2026 Banquet. 

IMPORTANT DATES

All dates are according to the time zone “Anywhere on Earth”, i.e., UTC-12.

• Abstract submission: February 6, 2026
• Paper submission: February 13, 2026
• Author notification: March 20, 2026
• Camera-ready due: April 3, 2026

PROGRAM CHAIRS

• Lola Burgueño, University of Málaga, Spain
• Riccardo Tommasini, INSA Lyon, France

GENERAL CHAIRS

• Andrea Mauri, Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, France

CONTACT

Any questions about submitting contributions to the research track should be emailed to icwe2026@easychair.org