General

Podcast.__init__ describes itself as “The Podcast About Python and the People Who Make It Great”, and the most recent episode is " Biopython with Peter Cock, Wibowo Arindrarto, and Tiago Antão (Episode 125)". Listening to the finished podcast, interviewer Tobias Macey did a great job. There are things I would have liked to have said - but it turned out pretty well. I hope you’ll agree: Its worth looking back over the podcast archives, here are a few that caught my eye: [Read More]

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a two day meeting focused on open source bioinformatics. We aim to encourage and support a friendly, open and productive community that helps us work together to answer hard biological questions. We’ll get together this summer, July 8-9, in Orlando, Florida. Abstracts for BOSC 2016 talks and posters are due this Friday, April 1st. We want to hear about your research and encourage everyone to submit an abstract. [Read More]

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2016: Jennifer Gardy Dr. Jennifer Gardy is both a scientist and science communicator. She holds a PhD in Bioinformatics, and is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and a Senior Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). At the BCCDC, she pioneered a new way of investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases – “genomic epidemiology”, which uses a pathogen’s genome sequence as a tool for understanding how an infectious disease spreads. [Read More]

Announcing the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2015: Holly Bik Dr Holly Bik is a Birmingham Fellow (assistant professor) in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. She obtained her Ph.D. in molecular phylogenetics at the University of Southampton, UK (working in conjunction with the Natural History Museum, London), followed by subsequent postdoctoral appointments at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire and the UC Davis Genome Center. [Read More]

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015. Dates: 10-11 July, 2015 Location: Dublin, Ireland Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2015 Email: bosc@open-bio.org BOSC announcements mailing list Twitter: @OBF_BOSC and @OBF_News Important Dates: March 24, 2015: Registration opens for ISMB and BOSC ( https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2015-registration) April 3, 2015: Deadline for submitting BOSC abstracts May 3, 2015: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors July 8-9, 2015: BOSC Codefest 2015, Dublin July 10-11, 2015: BOSC 2015, Dublin July 10-14, 2015: ISMB/ECCB 2015, Dublin The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) covers the wide range of open source bioinformatics software being developed, and encompasses the growing movement of Open Science, with its focus on transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance. [Read More]

Last year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 was very productive for the OBF with six students working on Bio* and related bioinformatics projects. We applied to be part of GSoC 2015, but unfortunately this year were not accepted. Google’s program is enormously popular, and over-subscribed, meaning Google has had to rotate organisation membership. The OBF is grateful to have been accepted in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. This year any participation will be down to individual projects to find a willing umbrella group from the organisations accepted for GSoC 2015. [Read More]

Bioinformatics Open Source Codefest, July 9 and 10th in Boston, now with sponsored food and drinks! The OBF will be holding the fifth annual BOSC Codefest, an informal two day “hackathon” or “coding festival” preceding the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014) in Boston (USA). This year, the BOSC Codefest 2014 is being hosted by hack/reduce (a wonderful hackerspace in Cambridge, Boston) and has also been kindly sponsored by Curoverse (the team behind the open source platform Arvados) and Harbinger Partners, Inc. [Read More]

Thanks to those who participated in the BOSC 2014 Keynote Competition! Our winner is Manuel Corpas, who correctly surmised Philip Bourne: https://twitter.com/manuelcorpas/status/412520369044463616 (In fact, we had already confirmed Philip Bourne as our second keynote speaker before his new job at NIH was announced.) Congratulations, Manuel, on winning free admission to BOSC 2014! Dr. Bourne’s keynote talk will be entitled “Biomedical Research as an Open Digital Enterprise”: The biomedical research lifecycle is fast becoming completely digital and increasingly open to the point that publishing could simply become changing the access control on given research objects comprising ideas, hypotheses, data, software, results, conclusions, reviews, grants and so on. [Read More]

We’re pleased to officially confirm that one of the two keynote speakers for the 15th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2014) will be C. Titus Brown, as he announced on Twitter recently: Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown): Excited to be a keynote speaker at BOSC 2014! My title: “A History of Bioinformatics (in the year 2039)” - plenty of room for mischief ;) https://twitter.com/ctitusbrown/status/410934403565490176 In recognition of the growing use of Twitter and social media within science as a way of connecting across geographical divides, we’re announcing a Twitter competition to guess who is scheduled to give the second keynote at BOSC 2014 in Boston. [Read More]

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) will be holding a public Board of Directors meeting on Tuesday, 13 Nov, 2012, at 11.30am EST (8.30am PST, 17:30 CET, 16:30 UTC/GMT). The meeting will be held online or over conference call. We will post details about how to dial in or connect closer to the date ( here). On the agenda Richard Holland and Chris Fields are running for election to the Board, and some other items primarily up for discussion, including how to keep our membership roll up-to-date and increasing with the least barriers. [Read More]