Bosc

We recognize that the high price of travel and registration can make it hard for some people to attend BOSC/ISMB. Below are some ways to apply for financial assistance to present your work at BOSC 2025.

We are pleased to announce that BOSC and the newly-renamed Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation (BOKR) will join forces for a day at ISMB/ECCB 2025! The joint session will include talks chosen from abstracts submitted to BOSC or BOKR, plus a keynote speaker who is well known in both the ontology and open science communities (stay tuned for an announcement soon!).

CollaborationFest 2025 will be a two-day collaborative work event at which participants work together to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases. Bring your own project ideas or come ready to collaborate with others on their projects!

BOSC has held CollaborationFests (aka CoFests) every year before or after ISMB since 2010. This year, we decided to hold the CollaborationFest as part of ISMB/ECCB and open it to all registered ISMB/ECCB participants. It will take place during the last two days of ISMB/ECCB.

We invited our community to nominate potential keynote speakers for BOSC, and we were delighted with the many excellent suggestions received. In the next stage of this process, we’re providing you with an opportunity to express any concerns regarding the suitability of any nominated individuals as BOSC Keynote Speakers.

Our invited speaker selection process and criteria include examples of potential reasons for exclusion. If you have concerns about any of the individuals on our list, please share them (with as much detail as you feel comfortable providing) through this anonymous form by Friday, January 24, 2025.

We invite you to join us for BOSC 2025, a vibrant gathering at the forefront of open-source bioinformatics and open science!

• Location: Liverpool, UK, and virtual
• Dates: July 21-22, 2025
• Website: /events/bosc/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14344023/
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bosc.bsky.social
• Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/obf-bosc/shared_invite/zt-n5ur1gsj-z2C~69_4lYTFPg5tbWA8Ew

Key Dates

• January 16, 2025: Deadline for community nominations of keynote speakers
• April 17: Deadline for submitting talk/poster abstracts
• May 13: Talk/poster acceptance notifications
• May 15: Late poster submission deadline
• July 20-24: ISMB/ECCB 2025
• July 21-22: BOSC 2025 (the first two full days of ISMB/ECCB 2025)
• July 23-24: ISMB CollaborationFest

About BOSC

The talk videos from BOSC 2024 are now available on YouTube. They are also linked from the BOSC talk schedule (scroll down to “Talks”).

Stay tuned - our full report on BOSC 2024 will be published soon!

By Beatrice Mihalache

Examining open source projects has been most useful to me while I am sharpening my coding skills, so I was excited to learn about the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference – BOSC.  I am a rising senior at UCLA, studying biophysics and data science. I strongly believe in open source, so I submitted the work I’d done with my PI and my grad student collaborator for a poster presentation at BOSC. My research lab at UCLA allocates conference participation funds only for graduate students, therefore I also included a request for fee waiver with my conference submission. I was excited when a few weeks later I received notification that not only I was accepted as a poster presenter, but that I also got free registration to both BOSC and to the entire ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference!

This year will mark the 15th edition of the BOSC-associated CollaborationFest, or CoFest for short. At these events, participants work together on code, documentation, training materials, use cases, and analyses.

CoFest 2024 will take place on July 17-18, right after ISMB and BOSC 2024. This will be a hybrid event, hosted at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal and online. Many thanks to Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo , BF Francis Ouellette, and Karen Reynard for finding and donating the use of this venue!

BOSC is an entirely volunteer-run event. We have an organizing committee of 8 people (see /events/bosc-2024/), and we are assisted by a larger review committee. The review committee is responsible for reading all the submitted abstracts and assessing them for quality and appropriateness to BOSC. You can read more about our review process here.

Our tentative review committee for 2024 is listed below. If you have any concerns about anyone on the list, please contact us at bosc@open-bio.org (that mailing list is private to the organizing committee and is not accessible to the larger review committee) or private-message any of the organizing committee members by email or in Slack.

Gemma Turon, PhD spoke at an ISCBacademy webinar on March 5, 2024. Her talk was entitled “Ersilia, open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery”. The talk video is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcEkCuJpZbw. Dr. Turon’s bio and talk abstract can be found in this blog post.