We invite submissions for the journal track of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD) 2016. The conference provides an international forum for the discussion of the latest high-quality research results in all areas related to machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovery. The conference will take place in Riva Del Garda, Italy, September 19-23, 2016. This edition will feature a full day of plenary presentations---for papers of general interest to the whole community---and two days of parallel sessions. All accepted papers will be presented both orally and as posters. What papers are eligible for the journal track? Papers on all topics related to machine learning, knowledge discovery, and data mining are invited. However, given the special nature of the journal track, only papers that satisfy the quality criteria of journal papers and at the same time lend themselves to conference talks will be considered. This implies that journal versions of previously published conference papers, or survey papers will not be considered for the special issue. Papers that do not fall into the eligible category may be rejected without formal reviews but can of course be resubmitted as regular papers. Authors are encouraged to adhere to the best practices of Reproducible Research (RR), by making available data and software tools for reproducing the results reported in their papers. For the sake of persistence and proper authorship attribution, we require the use of standard repository hosting services such as http://dataverse.org, http://mldata.org, http://openml.org, etc. for data sets, and http://mloss.org, https://bitbucket.org, https://github.com, etc. for source code. Authors who submit their work to the special ECMLPKDD issues of the journals commit themselves to present their results at the ECMLPKDD 2016 conference in case of acceptance. How to submit? To submit to this track, authors have to make a journal submission to either the Springer Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal or the Springer Machine Learning journal, and indicate that the submission is for the “ECMLPKDD 2016" special issue. It is recommended that submitted papers do not exceed 20 pages including references and appendices, formatted in the Springer journal slyle (svjour3,smallcondensed). This is a soft limit, but if a submission exceeds the limit, please provide a brief justification regarding the length in the cover letter. Authors are required to include a cover letter containing a short summary of their contribution (2 pages max), where they address the following questions: 1. What is the main claim of the paper? Why is this an important contribution to the machine learning/data mining literature? 2. What is the evidence provided to support claims? Be precise. 3. What papers by other authors make the most closely related contributions, and how is the paper related to them? 4. Who are the most appropriate reviewers for the paper? Authors are encouraged to suggest up to four candidate reviewers (especially if external to the Guest Editorial Board), including a brief motivation for each suggestion. What is the reviewing process? The journal track allows continuous submissions from the end of September 2015 to March 2016. We expect two cutoffs per month on which we distribute papers to reviewers with the first one being the 27th of September 2015 and the last one being the 30th of March 2016. For papers accepted without revisions we strive for a turn around time of two months. This means that we should be able to include all of those submissions in the special issue. However, in the last years there has often been the need for revisions and we therefore recommend to submit papers as early as possible. Contact You can contact the Journal Track Chairs at jt_chairs@ecmlpkdd2016.org.