TL;DR: The OBF isn’t doing enough in public policy and advocacy around Open Science, and we are looking to recruit a new board member who is interested in this role. Is that you? If yes, then contact us. At our October meeting, the OBF board took some time to think broadly about the OBF, current and future. We tried to answer the questions: What do we say we do? What do we actually do? [Read More]

This time of year we’d normally be having a public board meeting as part of our commitment to communication with our member projects and the wider OBF community. As per our bylaws we notify the community at least 10 days in advance, and we’d also handle election of new board members and leadership changes where appropriate. For a couple of reasons, we’re going to postpone that until early 2018. Our mailing list server (which hosts many of our member project lists) has been overwhelmed in the past few days, leading to delayed or blocked communication not just to our members but for our member projects who rely on it. [Read More]

BOSC 2017 ( /wiki/BOSC_2017) was held in Prague in July 2017 as part of the annual ISMB conference. Nearly 250 people, half of whom were first-time attendees, participated in the meeting. Over 50 talks and a similar number of posters covered topics ranging from workflow tools to a crowd-funded “tree of beers.” This year’s Open Data theme was reflected in the keynote talks by Madeleine Ball and Nick Loman and the panel discussion about the opportunities and challenges of open data. [Read More]

Podcast.__init__ describes itself as “The Podcast About Python and the People Who Make It Great”, and the most recent episode is " Biopython with Peter Cock, Wibowo Arindrarto, and Tiago Antão (Episode 125)". Listening to the finished podcast, interviewer Tobias Macey did a great job. There are things I would have liked to have said - but it turned out pretty well. I hope you’ll agree: Its worth looking back over the podcast archives, here are a few that caught my eye: [Read More]

This blog post is syndicated from a post on Jonathan Sobel’s blog, originally published July 27, 2017. Jonathan was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend the 2017 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), held as part of the 2017 ISMB/ECCB meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2017. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events. The next call closes 15 December 2017. [Read More]

This blog post is syndicated from a post on Vitalina Kirgizova’s blog, originally published June 6, 2017. Vitalina was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend bioinformatics training course held at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal, in November 2016. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events. The next call closes 15 December 2017. [Read More]

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions of Biopython 1.70 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI). Windows installers and/or wheels should be available later. ( Update: Compiled wheel packages now available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 (we have now dropped support for Python 3. [Read More]

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague. Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients: Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! [Read More]

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors. But first a final reminder - today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017. Dawn Field Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. [Read More]