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After much discussion, the BCC2020 organizing committee has decided to hold the meeting on Remo.co, which is similar to Zoom but offers a more conference-like experience, with “floors” and “tables” where you can mingle with other attendees. It has great small group and presentation support, including for posters and demos. It’s also more fun than most online conference platforms.

Because Remo is not familiar to most BCC participants, we are holding two open houses, one in each hemisphere, the day before BCC training starts. These walk-throughs will introduce participants to Remo’s features and demonstrate how to navigate between sessions, poster/demos, BoFs, training and everything else.

Biopython 1.77 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI.

This is the first release since we dropped support for 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.

This release of Biopython supports Python 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 It has also been tested on PyPy3.6.1 v7.1.1.

pairwise2 now allows the input of parameters with keywords and returns the alignments as a list of namedtuples.

We’re old hands at organizing in-person BOSC s (some of us were involved in planning the very first BOSC, in 2000), but this is the first time we’re attempting an online conference, and we want your help to make BCC2020 a rewarding experience for all.

We know many of you have attended other virtual conferences recently, and we’re interested in hearing what worked well and what didn’t. In particular, we are trying to figure out how to make virtual posters work, and how to run Q&A (with audio, or just typed? live, right after the talks, or asynchronous?). We’re also interested in ideas for adding fun social elements to what could otherwise be a pretty dull extended videoconference.

on behalf of the OBF Board members

We are delighted to announce that four awardees have been selected to receive the OBF travel fellowship for 2020 round 1, to support their participation in virtual events.

The OBF travel fellowship is now offered 2 times a year to multiple awardees towards supporting their participation in scientific workshops, conference and training events. The selection of individuals is made based on their applications, which state how their participation in the chosen event helps them promote open science practices in bioinformatics and/or enhance representation of minority groups in their communities.

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.

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.S.C, Elixir, and de.NBI.

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. BOSC, which was first held in partnership with the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) in 2018, will again be co-hosted with GCC at the online Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020) this July.

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. We welcome your input on how to make our first Virtual Bioinformatics Community Conference a success.

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.

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. You can view the eligibility criteria here and the whole timeline here. The application portal opens on March 16 but feel free to contact the mentors of projects you are interested in already. It’s a fantastic opportunity to write code, learn about open source development, and be a part of a welcoming and diverse community, while earning a stipend! All information about OBF’s GSoC participation can be found here.