Conferences

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award. Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients: Anisha Keshavan – attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post). [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Anisha Keshavan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the 2018 eLife Innovation Sprint in Cambridge, May 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. This was one of three awards from our April 2018 travel fellowships call. The current call closes 15 August 2018, you might want to apply? It is hard for me to put into words the thrill, excitement, and inspiration I’m feeling after attending the 2 day eLife Innovation sprint on May 10th and 11th. The #eLifeSprint ( https://elifesciences.org/events/c40798c3/elife-innovation-sprint-2018) in Cambridge, UK, brought together software developers, researchers, designers, and anyone who was passionate about leveraging web technology to advance open scientific communication. The goal: to save science from itself! [Read More]

This is a guest blog post from Farah Zaib Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend our annual conference BOSC 2017 and its preceding Codefest in Prague, July 2017. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes 15 December 2017, you might want to apply? [Read More]

BOSC 2017 ( /wiki/BOSC_2017) was held in Prague in July 2017 as part of the annual ISMB conference. Nearly 250 people, half of whom were first-time attendees, participated in the meeting. Over 50 talks and a similar number of posters covered topics ranging from workflow tools to a crowd-funded “tree of beers.” This year’s Open Data theme was reflected in the keynote talks by Madeleine Ball and Nick Loman and the panel discussion about the opportunities and challenges of open data. [Read More]

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague. Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients: Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! [Read More]

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors. But first a final reminder - today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017. Dawn Field Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. [Read More]

The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July. The travel fellowship program ( announced 1 May 2016) aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Applications for the first round in 2016 were due on April 15, with two more due dates this year on August 15 and December 15. [Read More]

We are very pleased to announce our new Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Travel Fellowship program. The program is designed to enable people, whether long-standing members of our community or newcomers, to participate in eligible events for which costs would otherwise be prohibitive. This includes our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC). Although not limited to specific groups of people, the program constitutes another major step for us in our ongoing efforts to increase the diversity in our communities in particular, and in the open source / open science bioinformatics community in general. [Read More]

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has always been about community. Launched in 2000, BOSC aims to provide a forum for both bioinformatics developers and users to share ideas and code and learn about the latest developments in open source bioinformatics and open science. Our goal this year is to welcome even greater participation, opening the door even wider to participants who have historically been underrepresented in the world of open source bioinformatics and, therefore, at BOSC. [Read More]