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Please Donate

Through our fiscal sponsor, Software in the Public Interest, Inc., you can donate to the OBF, including online by credit card. Donations made through SPI are 501(c)3 tax-exempt in the US. (SPI also has a charitable partner organization in Europe.) Your contribution helps fund a growing community of people committed to developing reusable open-source software for advancing biological research.

Call for the first round of OBF Event Fellowship 2024 & overview of the last round of 2023

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 1, is now open. The deadline for this round […]

Early Poster Acceptance Round 2024

Abstract submission for BOSC 2024 is now open! Since some people can’t get conference travel approval from their institution until [&#823...

ISCBacademy: Gemma Turon on open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery

Gemma Turon, PhD (CEO and co-founder at Ersilia Open Source Initiative) will present on March 5 BOSC and the OBF […]

Community comment period open for potential BOSC 2024 keynotes

We asked our community to nominate potential BOSC keynote speakers, and we were pleased with the great suggestions! In the […]

Nominate a keynote speaker for BOSC!

We are seeking a diverse list of potential BOSC keynote speakers. We invite you, our community, to nominate people you […]

See also our news page, and twitter.

About Us

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non-profit, volunteer-run group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community.

Our main activities are:

The Foundation does not participate directly in the development or structure of the open source work, but as the members of the foundation are drawn from our projects' developer communities, there is clear commonality of direction and purpose.

The OBF is governed by a Board of Directors. Our bylaws lay out how the Board is elected, holds public meetings, and conducts its business, as well as the scope and role of our membership. OBF is an associated project with Software In The Public Interest, Inc., a fiscal sponsorship organization, and through SPI we can accept tax-exempt charitable donations.

The OBF is open to anyone who is interested in promoting open source bioinformatics / open science. Please see the Membership page for more information.

History

OBF grew out of the volunteer projects BioPerl, BioJava and Biopython and was formally incorporated in 2001 in order to handle modest requirements of hardware ownership, domain name management and funding for conferences and workshops. In 2005, we enacted bylaws for the first time, and along with it created a formal membership.

In 2012, we decided to give up our own incorporation to associate ourselves with Software In The Public Interest, Inc., a fiscal sponsorship organization that we felt aligned well with our own values and culture. The bylaws underwent a series of changes, in part to better reflect our current practices, and in part to pave the way for joining SPI. The changes were approved on Sep 11, 2012, our membership overwhelmingly approved of associating with SPI, and as of October 12, 2012, OBF is a SPI-associated project.

BOSC

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has been held annually in conjunction with ISCB's meeting, ISMB, for the past 20 years. BOSC 2017 took place in July 2017, right before ISMB 2017 in Prague, Czech Republic.

For 2018, we are trying something different and holding BOSC along with the Galaxy Community Conference in a new unified event (GCC BOSC 2018), which will take place in Portland, Oregon, June 25-30.

We typically run an informal Codefest collaborative meeting before each BOSC.