EPJ Data Science

Submission deadline
31 July 2025

Digital, information and communication technologies, together with Big Data, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence, are reshaping almost every aspect of our societies. From traffic to logistics, from mobility to smart cities and societies, much of this gears towards more predictability, controllability, and automation, using digital twins and many other approaches. Optimizing performance, sustainability, resilience, and health are often stated goals. But what roles will complexity and collective intelligence, democracy and human rights, ethics, agency and freedom, co-creation and co-evolution play? And how can scientific disciplines – from data science and complexity theory to computational social science, network analysis, transportation modeling, game theory, and agent-based as well as AI-driven models – contribute to understanding these challenges and to shaping future solutions?

This special collection seeks to reflect on recent advances in these fields and explore visions for the future. It will provide a platform for critical reflection on the scientific methodologies and technological strategies currently driving our world. We invite inspiring contributions that provoke innovative thoughts and stimulate rigorous debate on the future trajectory of these technologies and the socio-technical systems that are expected to result from them.

Submit at: link.springer.com

The scientific community is increasingly aware of the profound challenges associated with research evaluation, particularly the reliance on quantitative journal metrics such as the impact factor as proxies for scientific quality. These practices have entrenched a system where researchers are compelled to publish in high-cost, high-impact journals to advance their careers, often at the expense of broader scientific contributions. Despite the growing adoption of initiatives like DORA (https://sfdora.org), Plan S (https://www.coalition-s.org), CoARA (https://coara.eu), or PEER Community (https://peercommunityin.org), which aim to reform research assessment and promote open science, progress has been slow, and deeply-ingrained evaluation schemes still dominate. Thus, initiatives that support dissemination of knowledge (outreach, extension), data curation and sharing, research in non-academic contexts (which is more “messy”, difficult to conduct) and in response to real-world needs and with impact is not sufficiently valued. These issues are compounded by the dominance of commercial publishers, whose exorbitant article processing charges (APCs) and profit-driven models exploit the academic community creating inequalities, fostering an unsustainable and unfair publishing system that threatens the very preservation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge.

Read the full article at: cssociety.org

Applications for the third Complexity Global School (CGS) are now open. Like last year, the school will be hosted at Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), in Bogotá, Colombia, but for the first time, applicants from all countries are eligible to apply. Roughly 60 students will be selected for the school, which will run July 28 – August 8, 2025. Supported by the Omidyar Network and the Ford Foundation, the school is free for all admitted students — tuition, room, board, and a travel stipend are included. Applications are due by March 2, 2025.

Apply at: www.santafe.edu

The Complex Systems Society announces the tenth edition of the CSS Scientific Awards. 

The Emerging Researcher Award recognizes promising researchers in Complex Systems within 3 years of their PhD defense.

The Junior Scientific Award is aimed at recognizing excellent scientific record of young researchers within 10 years of their PhD defense.

The Senior Scientific Award will recognize outstanding contributions of Complex Systems scholars at any stage of their careers.

Deadline: April 30th, 2025.

See https://cxdig.wordpress.com/community/awards for the list of previous awardees.

More at: cssociety.org

Ole Teutloff, Johanna Einsiedler, Otto Kässi, Fabian Braesemann,  Pamela Mishkin,  R. Maria del Rio-Chanona

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

We examine how ChatGPT has changed the demand for freelancers in jobs where generative AI tools can act as substitutes or complements to human labor. Using BERTopic we partition job postings from a leading online freelancing platform into 116 fine-grained skill clusters and with GPT-4o we classify them as substitutable, complementary or unaffected by LLMs. Our analysis reveals that labor demand increased after the launch of ChatGPT, but only in skill clusters that were complementary to or unaffected by the AI tool. In contrast, demand for substitutable skills, such as writing and translation, decreased by 20–50% relative to the counterfactual trend, with the sharpest decline observed for short-term (1-3 week) jobs. Within complementary skill clusters, the results are mixed: demand for machine learning programming grew by 24%, and demand for AI-powered chatbot development nearly tripled, while demand for novice workers declined in general. This result suggests a shift toward more specialized expertise for freelancers rather than uniform growth across all complementary areas.

Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com