We are glad to invite you to participate in the conference series LAWSci. The full title of this conference series is Challenges in Law, Technology, Life, and Social Sciences. LAWSci will be held from 15-30 April 2016 on the Sciforum platform.

This conference series promotes multidisciplinary collaborations and debate in the frontiers of Law, Technology, Life, and Social Sciences. The interaction between bioscience and ICTs has forged great developments in many fields. However, the appreciation of these discoveries is sadly, all too often, accompanied by a lack of understanding of the legal implications. This conference series aims to provide a reference to the various legal avenues that are available for the protection of scientific advances, but also the legal instruments to protect society from unwanted effects. It constitutes a study of some of the legal implications of bioscience and ICT advances, weighing their impact on society and the law's role in shaping that effect.

In this sense, the presentations will be focused on legal trends in different fields covering, but not limited to: patentability in plants and human genomics, clinical procedures’ standards, patients’ personal data protection, informed consent, regulatory issues in drug discovery, biomedical research legislation, toxicology, medico-legal problems such as healthcare malpractice, medical insurance or ethics in medical practice, software protection in chemoinformatics, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and social sciences, taxes in the biotechnology industry and causality/liability in environmental pollution, criminology, etc. The conference will run on-line and free, saving travelling and participation costs (subscriptions, open publication, participation in forum, certificates, etc., are free of cost). 

In addition, selected papers will be considered for publication in the journal LAWS (ISSN 2075-471X). This is an open access publication journal published quarterly by the editorial MDPI. This journal is focused on legal systems, theory, and institutions. The submission of full papers to this special issue is independent of the submission of short communications to the conference.