About the OBF

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non-profit, volunteer-run group that promotes open source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. Membership in the OBF is free and open to anyone who wants to help promote open source or open science in a biological field.

OBF runs the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).

BOSC 2025 will be July 21-22, 2025, in Liverpool, UK (as part of ISMB/ECCB 2025). BOSC 2024 took place July 15-16, 2024, as part of ISMB 2024 in Montréal, Canada.

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Poster session at GCCBOSC2018

OBF Treasurer Heather Wiencko introducing OBF at BOSC 2024

OBF Event Awards

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community.

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Ruth Nanjala, an OBF Travel Award winner, by her poster

Biopython paper published

An Application Note describing Biopython has recently been accepted for publication in the Oxford Journal Bioinformatics. An advance copy of the Open Access article is available online:

P.J.A. Cock, T. Antao, J.T. Chang, B.A. Chapman, C.J. Cox, A. Dalke, I. Friedberg, T. Hamelryck, F. Kauff, B. Wilczynski and M.J.L. de Hoon (2009) Biopython: freely available Python tools for computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp163

Biopython and version control systems

Initially for evaluation purposes only, Giovanni and Bartek have setup a mirror of Biopython on GitHub, which is automatically updated from the OBF hosted Biopython CVS repository. See our git migration wiki page for details. If this is favorably received, then moving Biopython from CVS to git seems likely at some point this year. Originally, all the OBF hosted projects used CVS for their source code repositories. At the start of 2008, BioPerl and BioJava moved over to Subversion (SVN), followed by BioSQL. [Read More]

Release 1.6 of BioPerl-run, BioPerl-db, BioPerl-network

All, I am proud to announce that the 1.6 release for BioPerl-run, BioPerl- db, and BioPerl-network are now available by direct download and via CPAN. These are designated as 1.006000, with a requirement for BioPerl 1.6 and higher (1.006000). FIXED: Bio::Tools::Run::Primer3 now accepts primer3 or primer3_core as executable names Bio::Tools::Run::Vista tests now pass if Vista.jar is installed. bug fix in bioperl-network What remains for the 1.6 release series: \* Documentation, Documentation, and Documentation. [Read More]

BOSC 2009 Call for Abstracts

Please forward as appropriate and forgive multiple postings. Call for Abstracts for the 2009 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2009 An ISMB 2009 Special Interest Group (SIG) Date: June 27-28, 2009 Location: Stockholm, Sweden URL: /wiki/BOSC_2009 Abstract submission via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=bosc2009 Important Dates Monday, April 13: Abstract deadline May 1, 2009: Notification of accepted abstracts May 15, 2009: Early Registration Discount Cut-off date June 27-28, 2009: BOSC 2009 The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. [Read More]

Google Summer of Code: Call for Bio* Volunteers

Google is committed to run the Summer of Code program again this year. It will be for the 5th time. In broad strokes, the program funds what you might call remote summer internships for students to contribute to an open-source software project. Projects (or umbrella organizations) wishing to participate in the program apply during the organization application period (March 9-13 in 2009). Those accepted into the program provide project ideas and supply mentors that guide the work on those. [Read More]

BioPerl 1.6 released

Release Pumpkin Chris Fields has announced the release of BioPerl 1.6 - the first stable release in a several years containing many significant improvements and bug fixes. I am proud to announce, on behalf of the BioPerl core developers, that BioPerl 1.6.0 is now available. This is the first BioPerl core release in the 1.6 series and is considered a ‘stable’ (non-developer) release. The distribution has been uploaded to CPAN and is available under author name CJFIELDS; it should be hitting the various CPAN nodes over the next 24 hours. [Read More]

BOSC 2009 accepted by ISMB

Belated, and probably most of you knew already, but just in case you didn’t, the 2009 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) was accepted on Dec 16 as a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting by the respective ISMB 2009 review committee. Special thanks and congratulations to Kam Dahlquist, who agreed again this year to chair the conference, and who pulled the proposal together. You can follow the organization and the conference taking shape at the BOSC 2009 wiki page. [Read More]