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We look forward to receiving lots of abstracts by the end of this week from people interested in presenting at the online Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which combines the Galaxy Community Conference, and our own Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC). The BCC2020 abstract submission deadline is Friday 8 May 2020. Some of the recent round of the OBF Travel Fellowships will be supporting BCC2020 attendees with video conferencing costs (headsets, web-cameras, etc), full announcement coming soon. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting Open Source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Michael Thompson’s participation at the Galaxy Admin Training 2020 workshop in Barcelona was supported by this fellowship. Find more information here. I had the opportunity to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (B.S.C) in Spain from 2nd - 6th March 2020 to participate in the Galaxy Admin Training 2020, organized by Galaxy Europe and in partnership with B. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation was shocked and saddened to learn that our colleague and collaborator James Taylor, a professor of biology and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, died on April 2, 2020. James was one of the creators and PIs of the Galaxy Project, which is among the most widely used platforms in open bioinformatics. The Galaxy community has created a tribute page for James. We have close ties to James and the Galaxy project via our flagship conference. [Read More]

The 2020 Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which brings together the BOSC and Galaxy communities, will take place online–more info here. The online meeting will still be held July 18-21. Registration will open in a few weeks, and fees will be lower than for an in-person meeting. Abstract submission will open soon and will close April 30th. We will follow the usual submission and review processes. We are discussing how to arrange the schedule to allow for participation across the globe. [Read More]

In light of the current outbreak, we urge everyone to avoid travelling if possible, in order to slow the rate at which the virus spreads to vulnerable people. You may have read that the BCC (BOSC+Galaxy) committee is delaying registration whilst considering the best options. With the next travel fellowship deadline approaching on April 1st, we are issuing slightly different advice regarding the types of applications we’d like to see, compared to previous years. [Read More]

OBF has been selected as a Google Summer of Code mentor organisation for the 5th consecutive time! We are proud to be hosting over 13 projects from various sub-organisations that aim to promote open science. This year OBF’s application was led by Sarthak Sehgal, Kai Blin, Yo Yehudi, and Michael Crusoe. Last year, GSoC 2019, was another good year with five students successfully completing their projects. Call to students to apply for GSoC OBF is welcoming students across the globe with a passion for open science to apply for GSoC. [Read More]

We are currently accepting applications for the first application round for the OBF Travel Fellowship 2020. This fellowship aims to promote the conference/event participation of attendees who advocate and present their work related to open-source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. In 2019, a total of 9 applicants received OBF travel fellowships to attend various conferences across the globe to present their work, gain new skills and promote Open Science practices in their respective areas of life science. [Read More]

During the public OBF Board Meeting held on December 17, 2019, elections were held for five Board members whose terms were about to expire. All five stood for re-election to the Board, though with some changes of officers: Hilmar Lapp: stepped down after 8 years as President of the Board; elected to At-Large seat. Peter Cock: elected as President of the Board. Heather Wiencko: elected as Treasurer, replacing previous Treasurer Peter Cock. [Read More]

Two awardees were chosen during the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship program, which closed on December 1, 2019. The program, which started in 2018, provides some travel funding to selected applicants who, by attending events in open source / open science, will help to promote diversity in the community. One of our awardees is Laura Acion from the Instituto de Calculo in Argentina, who will be attending CarpentryCon 2020 (June 29 - July 1 in Madison, WI) and Use R! [Read More]

Biopython 1.76 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. Coming relatively soon after our last release, the timing is linked to the official end of life for Python 2, and a focus hereafter on Python 3. We intend this to be our final release supporting Python 2.7 and 3.5. Focusing on Python 3.6 or later will let us take advantage of new functionality and syntax, and simplify our code base and testing. [Read More]