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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. This offers immense opportunities for software developers to enable the enterprise. I will describe a vision for the digital enterprise and what the NIH and others are doing to support the notion with the intent to accelerate scientific discovery.

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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.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.63 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon) from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

The current version removed the requirement of the 2to3 library. This was made possible by dropping Python 2.5 (and Jython 2.5).

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, and also Python 3.3.

The Biopython Tutorial & Cookbook, and the docstring examples in the source code, now use the Python 3 style print function in place of the Python 2 style print statement. This language feature is available under Python 2.6 and 2.7 via:

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.63 beta are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website.

This is a beta release for testing purposes, the main reason for a beta version is the large amount of changes imposed by the removal of the 2to3 library previously required for the support of Python 3.X. This was made possible by dropping Python 2.5 (and Jython 2.5).

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.62 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon) from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Python support

This is our first release of Biopython which officially supports Python 3. Specifically, this is supported under Python 3.3. Older versions of Python 3 may still work albeit with some issues, but are not supported.

We still fully support Python 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7. Support under Jython is available for versions 2.5 and 2.7 and under PyPy for versions 1.9 and 2.0. However, unlike CPython, Jython and PyPy support is partial: NumPy and our C extensions are not covered.

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. We will post a more detailed agenda in advance of the meeting ( here).

I am very pleased to announce that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F) is now a Software in the Public Interest (SPI) associated project, rather than its own not-for-profit incorporation.

An electronic vote of O|B|F members on whether or not to provisionally approve the invitation from SPI closed yesterday at 19:00 UTC. We had a participation of 39 out of 105 eligible, or 37%, which is far above the quorum of 10%. The tally is 38 for provisionally accepting and 1 against. The tally can be seen (and audited) here: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/e/OBFjoiningSPI

This is a reminder from the BOSC 2009 Organizing committee that abstracts for BOSC are due on Monday, April 13.