Call for Papers: International Journal of Forecasting – Open‑Source Forecasting
The use of open-source software has become increasingly prevalent throughout forecasting workflows, playing a pivotal role in making forecasting more accessible to a wider audience. In particular, there are now many mature, production-ready open-source forecasting libraries and large pre-trained models available for R, Python, and Julia.
Open-source forecasting tools have made forecasting more collaborative, accessible, and transparent. This has enabled wider adoption of forecasting, faster dissemination of new ideas, and improved reproducibility. Forecasting presents many novel challenges for software design, including complex data structures, temporal patterns, evaluation schemes, and other domain-specific needs. Accordingly, open-source forecasting software often requires specialised abstractions, scalable implementations, and careful design trade-offs to remain both practical and statistically sound.
We therefore invite submissions for a special section of the International Journal of Forecasting (IJF) dedicated to conceptual and methodological advancements in open-source forecasting software. The purpose of this special section is to share recent advancements in open-source forecasting, and encourage further open collaboration between forecasting specialists and software developers.
Areas of interest
This special section focuses on the design, development, and application of open-source forecasting software and models. The emphasis of the contributions should be on the intersection between software and forecasting, rather than simply be a showcase of forecasting software or methodology alone. Papers should be specific to how the unique challenges of forecasting are addressed in the open-source forecasting contributions, providing insights into how forecasting has shaped the design and development philosophy.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Forecasting software frameworks,
- Large pre-trained forecasting models,
- Forecasting at scale (efficient code, parallelisation),
- Benchmarking and forecast evaluation, and,
- Applications of open-source forecasting software in real and challenging operational environments.
Submission Guidelines:
To submit a paper for consideration for the special section, please upload your paper online and include a cover letter indicating that the paper is for the special section “Open-Source Forecasting”.
Please select ‘SI: Open-Source Forecasting‘ as article type in the submission system of the journal.
Submissions should go beyond describing a specific forecasting software library or a single empirical application, and instead highlight how distinctive forecasting problems have informed the design philosophy, software architecture, and user-facing interfaces.
Papers are expected to be concise contributions, with a typical length of around 20 pages (including references, tables, and figures), while still providing sufficient methodological detail and substantive discussion.
Contacts: Mitchell O’Hara-Wild, Anastasios Panagiotelis, and Tim Januschowski
Important Dates:
- Submission starts: 1 March 2026
- Submission deadline: 31 October 2026 (updated)