I attended the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2019) organized this year along with ISMB/ECCB in Basel, Switzerland from July 21st-25th. BOSC 2019 was in multiple ways a lot of ‘firsts’ for me. I was attending my first ISMB/ECCB. It also happened to be my first time in Europe. It was the first time I was putting faces and voices to a lot of names. Like in most of the conferences these days, I met a lot of Twitter-verse friends for the very first time. [Read More]

At the OBF’s July 2019 public Board meeting (held at BOSC 2019), Malvika Sharan was unanimously elected as a new at-large Board member. Malvika, who earned a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Würzburg, is a community outreach coordinator at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg. She is passionate about promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in bioinformatics and STEM in general. Malvika recently won a fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute to support her research into identifying and developing effective training strategies in low-income research environments (limited resources, lack of funding, etc. [Read More]

On July 25, 2019, the OBF held a public Board meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Organized as a Birds of a Feather session at BOSC 2019, the meeting was open to all attendees at ISMB. All but one of the current Board members were present (Secretary Chris Fields called in), as well as a number of ISMB/BOSC attendees. At the meeting, Malvika Sharan was elected as a new Board member. Other topics of discussion included the need for a Code of Conduct that applies to member projects as well as covering the yearly BOSC meeting; the policy for accepting new member projects; revisiting the OBF’s mission statement; and considering whether the OBF should issue position statements. [Read More]

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. Applications are reviewed three times a year. Applicants may apply for attending any event that develops or promotes open source development and open science in the biological research community. It doesn’t have to be an OBF-related event, and it can be one that you already attended in the recent past. For example, if you attended BOSC 2019 and your travel expenses were not covered by your employer or university, you could apply for a travel fellowship to help defray those expenses (up to a maximum of $1000, in most cases). [Read More]

As Europe experienced a record-breaking heat wave, BOSC 2019 attendees stayed cool in the Basel Congress Center (and many took breaks by floating down the Rhine). This was the 20th annual BOSC. In 2018, BOSC partnered with the Galaxy Community Conference in GCCBOSC2018; this year, it returned to ISMB as one of over a dozen “Communities of Special Interest” (COSIs). BOSC 2019 opened on July 24 with chair Nomi Harris noting that over its 20 years, BOSC has been held in 12 different countries, 6 US states and 2 Canadian provinces. [Read More]

The July 2019 Open Bioinformatics Foundation Public Board Meeting was held in person, as a Birds-of-Feather during the 2nd day lunch period of the 2019 BOSC. Date, Location and Dial-In Date and time: July 25, 12:45pm CEST Venue: Congress Center Basel, Switzerland, in the Dehli Room (ground floor, same room as BOSC) Dial-In for participating remotely: expired Agenda Old business: Approve minutes from March 2018 Public Board Meeting New business: [Read More]

Dear Biopythoneers, Biopython 1.74 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7. However, it will be the last release to support Python 3.4 which is now at end-of-life. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v6.0.0 and PyPy3.5 v6.0.0. (Please note we will be dropping support for Python 2.7 in early 2020.) Over half our code is now explicitly available under either our original “Biopython License Agreement”, or the very similar but more commonly used “3-Clause BSD License”. [Read More]

Note: This is a guest blog post from Angela Muraya, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the Africa Open Science Hardware Summit 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics event and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships . [Read More]

We are pleased to announce the April 2019 OBF Travel Fellowship recipients. The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. After carefully evaluating a competitive set of applications submitted from all around the globe, we were able to extend offers to five deserving applicants: Sara El-Gebali, Angela Wanjugu Muraya, Saket Choudhary, Aziz Khan and Vid Ayer. They have all accepted the award, and we are looking forward to hearing about their experiences. [Read More]

If you’d like the opportunity to present your work at BOSC 2019 (which will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on July 24-25, the last two days of ISMB/ECCB 2019), now’s your chance! The late round of abstract submission is open, and we will be choosing a few abstracts for “Late-Breaking Lightning Talks” as well as posters. BOSC welcomes submissions about all aspects of open source bioinformatics, open science and open data. [Read More]