Preliminary Policy Statement on Public Funding and Open Source
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation believes that scientific software developed with public support should be distributed under terms analogous to those applied to biological materials. In common with treatment of reagents under the UBMTA and good practice, we believe that the essential source code necessary for reproducing published results should be made readily available for non-commercial research use.
While acknowledging that open source licenses may not be optimal in every instance, we believe that development and release of software under open source licenses is often beneficial and efficient in creating valuable scientific software, and in encouraging its widespread use and most successful exploitation.
We view researchers as the individuals most capable of determining if their software will be developed and exploited in an optimal manner under an open source license, and we therefore encourage institutions to delegate to their scientists the opportunity to select non-restrictive and open source licenses for their software.
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit (pending) organization dedicated to supporting the development, distribution, and understanding of collaborative software in computational biology and bioinformatics. Dating from 1994 and incorporated in 2001, the Foundation sponsors the annual Biological Open Source Conference, software development workshops, and provides umbrella support to the Bioperl, Biopython, BioJava, and other open source bioinformatics development efforts. More than 1000 individuals have signed on to Foundation lists or attended its conferences. Also referred to as open-bio and O|B|F, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation has no affiliation with the similarly named groups at openinformatics.org or bioinformatics.org. The Foundation’s website is at http://open-bio.org/