Software Engineering and COVID-19

Description

In a very short time the COVID-19 epidemic has spread over the world and affected us all, our societies, as well as the organisations we work for. Its effects have in many cases been tragic and we feel with those that have been and will be affected. 

The pandemic is already reshaping the way we work, also in software engineering, and drives changes to processes, methods, the use of collaboration tools etc. More effects will likely be seen in the years to come. While focus must be on saving lives the empirical software engineering community can also play a role to help study and understand the effects of the pandemic and its many and broad repercussions. 

This topical collection will collect papers where the pandemic is directly and/or indirectly driving the change and/or phenomena under study. The connection between the pandemic and submitted papers must be clear and explicit. Submitted papers must have a strong empirical basis/component to be eligible for this topical collection. The submissions will all be reviewed using the Empirical Software Engineering Journal standards. 

Schedule

There is no submission deadline. Papers can be submitted at any time.

Fast track Manuscripts

Authors can request to *fast track manuscripts*. To request a fast track:

1. Before submission: Please send an email with the title, author list, a preliminary abstract, and an estimated submission date to [email protected] This will help recruit reviewers in advance and ask them to provide reviews quickly, so that authors get a timely decision. 

2. After submission to the EditorialManager tool (see instructions below), please send a copy of the paper by email to [email protected] This allows the review process to start while the paper is still undergoing editorial checks by the Springer team.

3. We also encourage authors to share their pre-prints of their papers through open-access repositories such as arXiv.org. 

Please note that a fast tracked submission will still go out to review and may require a round of revisions. The quality of the papers submitted to the topical collection takes priority over speed. Still, we are committed to streamlining the process as much as possible.

We expect that authors of fast tracked manuscripts are willing to review other papers that are submitted to the topical collection.

Reviewers Wanted

If you’d like to to volunteer to review papers submitted to the special issue, please send an email to [email protected]

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering editorial manager website as follows (1) select “Research Papers” and (2) later on the Additional Information page:

– Answer “Yes” to “Does this paper belong to a special issue?”

– And select “Software Engineering and COVID-19″ for “Please select the issue your manuscript belongs to.”

For formatting guidelines as well as submission instructions, visit http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664?detailsPage=pltci_2530593