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

Bioperl 1.5.1

 Posted on October 14, 2005  |  stajich

I am pleased to announce the 1.5.1 developer release of Bioperl.

Essential links here Core http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.tar.bz2

Run http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.tar.bz2

Ext http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.tar.bz2

MD5 sum http://bioperl.org/DIST/SIGNATURES.md5

Please see my mailing list post for more information.

[Read More]

O|B|F Board of Directors Meeting

 Posted on June 24, 2005  |  dag

The 2005 Board of Directors meeting for the Open Bioinformatics Foundation was held on Thursday, June 24th 2005 in Detroit, MI USA at the site of the BOSC2005 meeting.

This was a major meeting and represents the first attempt to build a governance platform for the organization as well as set up the mechanism for building a voting membership. The O|B|F members will be able to direct the operation of the organization and will also be able to join the Board.

Other major news from the meeting: - Ewan Birney steps down as president; joins Board as at-large member - Jason Stajich joins board and is elected President - Hilmar Lapp is elected to a new position of ‘Parlimentarian’ - Determined efforts to build a voting membership body

Links to meeting minutes and Election Bylaws follow are below …

[Read More]

site updated prior to server move

 Posted on June 24, 2005  |  dag

The backend MovableType software powering this site was upgraded and the backend storage was switched from berkelyDB to SQL. These preparations are being done to ease the transition of http://news.open-bio.org to a new server. The primary purpose of this news entry is to confirm that the posting system still works after the upgrade!

Minutes:2005 BOSC Meeting

 Posted on June 23, 2005  |  admin

Venue: Renaissance Center in Detroit, on the first floor next to the Starbucks. Date: June 23, 2005, 16:15. Call to order: Board members present: Chris, Hilmar, Ewan, Andrew Others: Jason Stajich Chris / Treasurer’s Report Review of the accounts / passing the statements around Summary of response to the fraud attempt Request to activate the debit card. Granted. The account got a $9,000 deposit but we don’t know who it comes from. [Read More]

PopGen HOWTO

 Posted on March 18, 2005  |  stajich

A PopGen HOWTO added to the website for using the population genetics modules in Bioperl.

The PAML HOWTO is in-process of being updated to describe the new functionalilty.

Biopython 1.40 beta released

 Posted on February 24, 2005  |  iddo

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.40 beta. It has been nine months since the last official release (1.30), and there are numerous changes, bugfixes, enhancements, goodies and new contributors. Most notable are the addition of the Nexus parser (Frank Kauff w/ Cymon Cox), the CAPS module (Jonathan Taylor), the Restriction enzyme package (Frederic Sohm), hefty improvements to Bio.PDB (Thomas Hamelryck), MutableSeq (Michiel de Hoon), and more. The delay in the release was caused by day jobs creeping into the lives of most core developers. [Read More]

Beginners HOWTO

 Posted on February 8, 2005  |  osborne

Brian Osborne and James Thompson have written a Bioperl HOWTO for beginners, for those who are interested in learning about Bioperl but have done very little programmming. Topics include creating a Sequence object, I/O and files, retrieving from Genbank, and using the Sequence object. [Read More]

BOSC 2005

 Posted on January 29, 2005  |  stajich

BOSC 2005 website /bosc/ The 6th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC'2005) is organized by the not-for-profit Open Bioinformatics Foundation. The meeting will take place June 23-24, 2005 in Detroit, Michigan, USA, and is one of several Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings occurring in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology. see http://www.iscb.org/ismb2005 for more information. Because of the power of many Open Source bioinformatics packages in use by the Research Community today, it is not too presumptuous to say that the work of the Open Source Bioinformatics Community represents the cutting edge of Bioinformatics in general. [Read More]