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.

Learn More

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.

Apply

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

More website updates

 Posted on February 13, 2006  |  stajich

Wordpress 2.0.1 installed. Presumably no major differences to be seen but some bug fixes installed. A Wiki spam filter was installed, we’ll see how well it performs but trying to cut down on spammers. We also will try and setup a RSS feed on the wiki main page so that news feeds from this site (and perhaps other open-bio sites) will be scrolled on the main BioPerl website. There are nice plugins for this in wikimedia we just need to find the time to do the install and testing. [Read More]

BioPerl on Mac OS X using fink

 Posted on January 30, 2006  |  mauricio

Instructions on how to install BioPerl on Mac OS X have been added to the Wiki, specifically at the Getting Bioperl section. Thanks to Koen van der Drift for contributing with this info. We continue to encourage people who is taking care of creating packages for other platforms (specific Linux distributions, Windows, etc.) to put in the wiki the necessary documentation about installing BioPerl and Perl modules in your favorite OS/distributions. [Read More]

Website is live

 Posted on January 25, 2006  |  stajich

(reposting this news from O|B|F News) I am pleased to announce the release of a new website for BioPerl. The site is based on the mediawiki software that was developed for the wikipedia project. We intend the site to be a place for community input on documentation and design for the BioPerl project. There is also a fair amount of documentation started surrounding bioinformatics tools and techniques applicable to using BioPerl and some of the authors who created these resources. [Read More]

new Bioperl website

 Posted on January 25, 2006  |  stajich

I am pleased to announce the release of a new website for BioPerl. The site is based on the mediawiki software that was developed for the wikipedia project. We intend the site to be a place for community input on documentation and design for the BioPerl project. There is also a fair amount of documentation started surrounding bioinformatics tools and techniques applicable to using BioPerl and some of the authors who created these resources. [Read More]

Publications and projects which reference BioPerl

 Posted on January 18, 2006  |  stajich

I’ve been updating the Publications page on the wiki to keep track of the number of pubs and projects which use BioPerl. Google scholar seems to get a lot of these correct, sometimes there are redundancies, but generally has been a good place to find this list. The other way is to go to each of the journal’s home pages, and search for “BioPerl” in the content, that can be tedious though…. [Read More]

New theme

 Posted on January 18, 2006  |  stajich

I installed the new Regulus theme, comments are welcome as to whether or not you like it.

It is possible to customize the color scheme and top-image as well if there are suggestions - perhaps we’ll build a header which incorporates our logo once that is decided.

Site software updated

 Posted on January 11, 2006  |  stajich

I’ve updated the wordpress install to 2.0 which has a lot more features and seems to be better setup for permissions and what not.

I also upgraded the wiki to 1.5.5 to deal with some potential security holes with WMF files.

I also changed the permalink structure so that the links are informative by date and post-slug. I like this much more.

Developer Release in FreeBSD

 Posted on December 8, 2005  |  mauricio

The Developer Release (1.5.1) of BioPerl has been brought back into the FreeBSD Ports Collection. For instructions on how to install it, please take a look into the Getting Bioperl section of the BioPerl Wiki. We encourage people who is taking care of creating packages for other platforms (specific Linux distributions, Mac OS, Windows, etc.) to put in the wiki the necessary documentation about getting and installing BioPerl releases in your favorite OS/distributions. [Read More]