OBF Public Board of Directors Meeting

 Posted on October 5, 2016  |  cjfields

The OBF has at least one public board meeting per year, in part to vote on important business issues, and in part to publicly discuss items relevant to the OBF community.  The latest public OBF Board of Director’s meeting took place October 4, 2016. It was attended by Board members Hilmar Lapp, Peter Cock, Nomi Harris, Chris Fields, and Karen Cranston, as well as guests Heather Wiencko (Board candidate), Michael Crusoe, Spencer Bliven, and Robert Gilmore.

The agenda, and tentative minutes (taken by then-secretary Peter Cock) are available from the OBF wiki.  The following is a summary:

[Read More]

Biopython 1.68 released

 Posted on August 26, 2016  |  peterc

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.68 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, but this will be our final release to run on Python 2.6. It has also been tested on PyPy 5.0, PyPy3 version 2.4, and Jython 2. [Read More]

BOSC 2016 in Disney World with Donald Docker!

 Posted on July 21, 2016  |  dimitras

First I would like to congratulate OBF that supports diversity in the community with its travel awards initiative. I was very pleased to be one of the three travel fellowship awardees. Thank you OBF! Ιt was great to attend BOSC 2016 and meet remarkable people and know their work.It was one of the most welcoming meetings I have attended and Ι liked that is was active on the social media and the conference materials and speaker presentations were available online. [Read More]

New BioJava Logo Design Competition

 Posted on June 14, 2016  |  andreas

BioJava is organizing a design competition to come up with a new logo. Anybody can participate: The logo should look modern and be better than the current one (yellow circle) The logo should be able to be rendered as a favicon, as well as large (e.g. on a t-shirt). Designs that come in two (or multiple) sizes are ok. Logos shall not look similar in any way to the trademarked Java programming language logo. [Read More]

Biopython 1.67 released

 Posted on June 8, 2016  |  peterc

This was long over-due, but Biopython 1.67 was released earlier today. The most recent delay was due to migrating our website from MediaWiki to GitHub Pages earlier this year, following an OBF server failure. Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.67 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2. [Read More]

First three OBF travel fellowships awarded

 Posted on May 23, 2016  |  nlharris

The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July. The travel fellowship program ( announced 1 May 2016) aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Applications for the first round in 2016 were due on April 15, with two more due dates this year on August 15 and December 15. [Read More]

Welcome to our Google Summer of Code 2016 students

 Posted on April 25, 2016  |  kblin

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2016 program, and last Friday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources are limited and your proposals did not make it easy to select our finalists. We wish you all the best for your future endeavours, and hope to be able to work with you in future. [Read More]

Phyloinformatics Summer of Code supports OBF Travel Fellowship Program

 Posted on April 18, 2016  |  hilmar

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is pleased to announce a gift of USD 18,125 from the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code toward the OBF travel fellowship program. The program, announced earlier this year on March 1, aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. The program includes but is not limited to the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), OBF’s flagship event. [Read More]

BOSC CodeFest 2016

 Posted on March 28, 2016  |  brad

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a two day meeting focused on open source bioinformatics. We aim to encourage and support a friendly, open and productive community that helps us work together to answer hard biological questions. We’ll get together this summer, July 8-9, in Orlando, Florida. Abstracts for BOSC 2016 talks and posters are due this Friday, April 1st. We want to hear about your research and encourage everyone to submit an abstract. [Read More]