Events

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

CollaborationFest, CoFest for short, is a collaborative work event that has been held each of the past 13 years as a satellite event of BOSC. At these free events, held right before or after BOSC, participants  gather in small groups to exchange ideas and work together on projects including but not limited to hacking. Participants were encouraged to submit their project ideas in advance to facilitate collaboration.

CoFest 2023 took place during the two days just before BOSC, which was part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon and online. It was the first in-person edition after several online-only CoFests, due to Covid pandemics. It was hosted by Jérémy Just at the nearby École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, which provided space and infrastructure, with funding from Complex Systems Institute for lunches and coffee breaks. Free virtual machines were made available by the French Institute for Bioinformatics and the Pôle scientifique de modélisation numérique.

The 24th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2023, took place as part of ISMB/ECCB 2023 in Lyon, France, and online. ISMB/ECCB attracted a near-record number of attendees, with over 2100 in person and  about 900 more online.

Most of the BOSC organizing committee (missing: Jessica Maia and Chris Fields)A full room at BOSC 2023

The opening session of BOSC kicked off with a welcome from chair Nomi Harris. An overview of BOSC’s parent organization, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, was presented by OBF Board member Bastian Greshake Tzovaras.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Daniela Senra, a PhD researcher at Centro Regional de Estudios Genómicos, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Human Cell Atlas General Meeting 2023.

In July, I had the incredible opportunity to attend and present a lightning talk at the Human Cell Atlas General Meeting 2023, that took place in the city of Toronto, Canada, from July 10th to July 12th, 2023.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2023, round 2, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2023. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from September 2023 to April 2024. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 14, 11am EDT/ 15:00 (not 16:00!) UTC
Location: Online webinar hosted by ISCB and free to the public. (Video now available at https://youtu.be/M2vAotWKd_Q) 
Speaker: Hannah Wei, co-founder and technologist at the Patient-Led Research Collaborative
Topic: Re-Thinking the Patient’s Role in a Learning Health System: Lessons from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative

The ISCB, which runs the annual ISMB conference, is offering a series of ISCBacademy webinars hosted by the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs), which include BOSC/OBF. These webinars are now open to the public; you’ll just need to create an ISCB Nucleus account to register for the webinar.

[Read More]

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2022, round 2 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 October 2022. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling the form – make a copy of this template.

We invite applications from candidates who are seeking financial support to attend or host relevant scientific events from late October 2022 to April 2023. These events can be conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Jemima Becker, DPhil student at Merton College, University of Oxford, attended the EMBO workshop: “Neural stem cells: From basic understanding to translational applications", supported by this fellowship granted to him in the first round of 2022.

This June, I had the opportunity to travel to the EMBO workshop: “Neural stem cells: From basic understanding to translational applications”. There, I presented a poster documenting the first six months of my PhD work on long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the postnatal ventricular-subventricular (V-SVZ): “Long noncoding RNAs in the Ventricular-Subventricular zone: what have we learnt from single cell transcriptomics?”.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Furkan M. Torun, Data Scientist at OmicEra Diagnostics & Computational Biologist, attended the PyCon Italia 2022, supported by this fellowship granted to him in the first round of 2022.

Background

As it is shown in the surveys of the programming languages used and the latest publications in the field of bioinformatics/computational biology, Python has experienced unprecedented growth. Meanwhile, to spread knowledge, learn from each other, and make new networks for Pythonistas, several Python conferences (“PyCon”), are held annually by the international communities worldwide.

The BOSC-OBF 2021 Event Support Fund enabled awardees to register for free for BOSC 2021, an annual conference hosted by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), which promotes and facilitates the open source bioinformatics development and open science. Based on the OBF Event Fellowship program, the BOSC-OBF support fund aimed to facilitate participation of diverse researchers from historically underrepresented groups at BOSC, helping to spread wider awareness and adoption of open source bioinformatics practices in the biological research community. One of the BOSC-OBF awardees was Gemma Turon, a researcher from the Ersilia Open Source Initiative (EOSI), who writes here about her experience at BOSC 2021.