Data-Centric Engineering (Cambridge University Press) is delighted to renew its publishing partnership with the ACM BuildSys Conference. BuildSys2025 takes place on 20-21 November in Golden, Colorado, USA. The Program Chairs will make a selection of accepted papers with a clear engineering focus and encourage the authors to submit their work to DCE as part of an ongoing special collection dedicated to the conference's theme of Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation. 

Jump to: 

• About BuildSys
• Timetable
• How to Submit
• Peer Review
• Why Submit to DCE?
• Open Access
• Guest Editors

About BuildSys

Advances in the effective integration of networked sensors, building controls, and physical infrastructure are transforming our society, allowing the formation of unprecedented built environments and interlocking physical, social, cyber challenges. Moreover, built environments, including buildings and critical urban infrastructure, account for over half of society's energy consumption and are the mainstay of our nation's economy, security and health. As a result, there is a broad recognition that systems optimizing explicitly for the built environment are particularly important in improving our society, and represent the foundation for emerging "smart cities".

BuildSys is a venue for researchers and practitioners working to develop and optimize such smart infrastructure systems that are driven by networked sensing, computing, and control functions. Authors who took part in the 2024 edition of the Conference are encouraged to submit their work to DCE to be considered for a special collection (ongoing special issue) dedicated to the theme of the conference. 

Timetable

Key dates in the BuildSys2025 Call for Papers:

• Full paper submission: August 1, 2025
• Paper notification: September 19, 2025
• Conference dates: November 20-21, 2025

Selected authors will be encouraged to submit to DCE by the following deadline:

• Submission deadline: April 6, 2026

 Earlier submission is encouraged and could result in earlier publication. DCE publishes on a continuous and open-access basis: articles are published as soon as possible after acceptance. All accepted papers will be added to a special collection page dedicated to BuildSys.

How to Submit

Key considerations for submitting are below, with full details available in the DCE Instructions for Authors. 

Marked-up manuscript

We expect authors who published as part of the official BuildSys Proceedings to update or adapt their paper by 30% before submission to DCE. Provide a marked-up manuscript showing the changes made.

Article types

When they submit to DCE authors are given the following option of article types to select from:

• Research articles using data science methods and models for improving the reliability, resilience, safety, efficiency and usability of engineered systems.
• Translational papers demonstrating the downstream benefits of data-intensive engineering - and the underlying data science principles, techniques and technologies - to wider society, economy, environment, health and way of life. For some more detailed instructions, see this guide to translational papers.
• Data papers that describe in a structured way, with a narrative and accompanying metadata, important and re-usable data sets in open repositories with potential for re-use in engineering research and practice. These papers promote data transparency and data re-use.
• Survey papers providing a detailed, balanced and authoritative current account of the existing literature concerning data-intensive methods in a particular facet of engineering sciences.
• Tutorial reviews providing an introduction and overview of an important topic of relevance to the journal readership. The topic should be of relevance to both students and researchers who are new to the field as well as experts and provide a good introduction to the development of a subject, its current state and indications of future directions the field is expected to take

We anticipate that most BuildSys articles will be submitted as research articles.

Templates

Authors have the option but are not required to use the following templates:

• DCE LaTeX template files
• Overleaf (a LaTeX-based collaborative authoring tool; read about benefits of this tool)
• DCE Word template

Note that authors should provide both an abstract that summarises the paper (250 words or less) and beneath it an impact statement (120 words describing the significance of the findings in language that can be understood by a wide audience). Competing interest, funding and data availability statements should be provided at the end of the main text above the references (see disclosure statements).

Articles should be submitted through the DCE ScholarOne Manuscripts system, but note that if you use the Overleaf tool you can submit directly into the system without having to reupload files.

Peer Review

Given the rigour of the conference's review process, DCE can offer authors of full papers accepted into BuildSys a more streamlined process. We will consider the conference's reviews as counting towards the journal's review process and only seek a single additional review. Authors who had short papers accepted into the conference and expand them for submission to the journal will go through the standard DCE peer review process.

Why Submit to DCE?

✔ A venue dedicated to the potential of data science for all areas of engineering.
✔ Welcoming research and translational articles from authors, whether they are based in academia or industry.
✔ Well-cited (2024 Impact Factor: 2.8; 2024 CiteScore: 4.4) and indexed in Web of Science, Scopus and Directory of Open Access Journals.
✔ #OpenAccess with support for unfunded authors thanks to the Lloyd's Register Foundation - no hard requirement to pay an article processing charge (APC).
✔ Promotes open sharing of data and code through Open Science Badges.

Open Access

Any author can publish on an open access basis in DCE if accepted, irrespective of their funding situation or institutional affiliation. There are no financial barriers to publication. Many articles are covered through the Transformative Agreements that Cambridge has set up with universities worldwide. If the corresponding author on an article is affiliated with a Transformative Agreement this effectively covers open access publishing costs. Authors not affiliated with these agreements who have grants that budget for open access publication are encouraged to pay an article processing charge (APC). However, if an author has no funding and no institutional agreement, the charge will be waived without question. DCE is supported by a grant from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, which helps subsidise the publishing costs of unfunded authors.

BuildSys2025 Program Chairs & DCE Guest Editors

• Wan Du (University of California, Merced, USA) - Program Chair
• Susu Xu (Johns Hopkins University, USA) - Program Chair
• Xianzhong Ding (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) - Fast Track Chair