We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2016:

Jennifer Gardy

Dr. Jennifer Gardy is both a scientist and science communicator. She holds a PhD in Bioinformatics, and is an Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia and a Senior Scientist at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). At the BCCDC, she pioneered a new way of investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases – “genomic epidemiology”, which uses a pathogen’s genome sequence as a tool for understanding how an infectious disease spreads. Her group was the first to use genome sequencing to reconstruct a large outbreak of tuberculosis, and she is continuing to apply this novel technique to other outbreak scenarios. She is also involved in other genomics-related research, including replacing traditional laboratory microbiology protocols with single genomic analyses. In 2014, she was appointed the Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics, and is Senior Editor at the new open data, open access journal Microbial Genomics.

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. As explained in the just published BOSC 2015 report, inclusivity was one of the founding principles of the Bio* open-source project communities that came together under the OBF umbrella, and thus also of BOSC, our flagship event. OBF’s bylaws have included a nondiscrimination clause from the outset. OBF’s major member projects have not only always welcomed new participants to their communities, but embraced passing on leadership to people who hadn’t been part of the “inner circle” from the beginning.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is pleased to announce that we’ve finally entered the 21st century and upgraded our membership form from paper (yep!) to an online form.

Membership in the OBF is free, and is open to anyone who has attended BOSC or can otherwise demonstrate commitment to OBF’s goals. The information you enter on the form, including your email address, will be treated confidentially - we are in the business of promoting open source and open science, not in selling email addresses.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.66 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, although support for Python 2.6 is now deprecated. It has also been tested on PyPy 2.4 to 2.6, PyPy3 version 2.4, and Jython 2.7.

Further work on the Bio.KEGG and Bio.Graphics modules now allows drawing KGML pathways with transparency.

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. This includes (but is by no means limited to) women, people who aren’t white, older people, people from outside North America and Europe, and non-programmers.

Announcing the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2015:

Holly Bik

Dr Holly Bik is a Birmingham Fellow (assistant professor) in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. She obtained her Ph.D. in molecular phylogenetics at the University of Southampton, UK (working in conjunction with the Natural History Museum, London), followed by subsequent postdoctoral appointments at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire and the UC Davis Genome Center.

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015.

• Dates: 10-11 July, 2015
• Location: Dublin, Ireland
• Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2015
• Email: bosc@open-bio.org
• BOSC announcements mailing list
• Twitter: @OBF_BOSC and @OBF_News

Important Dates:

• March 24, 2015: Registration opens for ISMB and BOSC ( https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2015-registration)
• April 3, 2015: Deadline for submitting BOSC abstracts
• May 3, 2015: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors
• July 8-9, 2015: BOSC Codefest 2015, Dublin
• July 10-11, 2015: BOSC 2015, Dublin
• July 10-14, 2015: ISMB/ECCB 2015, Dublin

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) covers the wide range of open source bioinformatics software being developed, and encompasses the growing movement of Open Science, with its focus on transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance. We welcome submissions relating to all aspects of bioinformatics and open science software, including new computational methods, reusable software components, visualization, interoperability, and other approaches that help to advance research in the biomolecular sciences. We particularly wish to invite those who have not participated in previous BOSCs to join us this year!

Last year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 was very productive for the OBF with six students working on Bio* and related bioinformatics projects. We applied to be part of GSoC 2015, but unfortunately this year were not accepted.

Google’s program is enormously popular, and over-subscribed, meaning Google has had to rotate organisation membership. The OBF is grateful to have been accepted in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. This year any participation will be down to individual projects to find a willing umbrella group from the organisations accepted for GSoC 2015. For example, a Biopython project was included under NESCent for GSoC 2013.

In 2014, OBF had six students in the Google Summer of Code 2014™ (GSoC) program mentored under its umbrella of Bio* and related open-source bioinformatics community projects: Loris Cro (Bioruby) with mentors Francesco Strozzi and Raoul Bonnal; Evan Parker (Biopython) with mentors Wibowo Arindrarto and Peter Cock; Sarah Berkemer (BioHaskell) with mentors Christian Höner zu Siederdissen and Ketil Malde; and three students contributed to JSBML: Victor Kofia (mentors: Alex Thomas and Sarah Keating), Ibrahim Vazirabad (mentors: Andreas Dräger and Alex Thomas), and Leandro Watanabe (mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez and Chris Myers).

As a change from earlier years in which OBF participated in GSoC as a mentoring organization, in 2014 we purposefully defined our umbrella as much more inclusive of the wider bioinformatics open-source community, bringing it more in line with the annual Bioinformatics Open-Source Conference (BOSC).  In part this was also motivated by " paying it forward", a concept central to growing healthy open-source communities, after the larger domain-agnostic language projects such as SciRuby and PSF had extended an open hand to OBF mentors when OBF did not get admitted as a GSoC mentoring organization in 2013. In the end, four out of the six succeeding student applications were for projects outside of the traditional core Bio* projects, a result with which everyone won: We had a terrific crop of students, our community grew larger and stronger, and open-source bioinformatics was advanced in a more diverse way than would have been possible otherwise.

Hi all, I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of OBF’s Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) students:

• Sarah Berkemer - " Open source high-performance BioHaskell" (Mentors: Christian Höner zu Siederdissen, Ketil Malde) ( blog)
• Loris Cro - " An ultra-fast scalable RESTful API to query large numbers of VCF datapoints" (Mentors: Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal & the BioRuby team) ( blog)
• Victor Kofia - " JSBML: Redesign the implementation of mathematical formulas" (Mentors: Alex Thomas, Sarah Keating & the JSBML team) ( blog)
• Evan Parker - " Addition of a lazy loading sequence parser to Biopython’s SeqIO package" (Mentors: Wibowo Arindrarto, Peter Cock & the Biopython team) ( blog)
• Ibrahim Vazirabad - " Improving the Plug-in interface for CellDesigner" (Mentors: Andreas Dräger, Alex Thomas & the JSBML team) ( blog)
• Leandro Watanabe - " Dynamic Modeling of Cellular Populations within JSBML" (Mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez, Chris Myers & the JSBML team) ( blog)

Congratulations to our accepted students!