The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting Open Source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Michael Thompson’s participation at the Galaxy Admin Training 2020 workshop in Barcelona was supported by this fellowship.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation was shocked and saddened to learn that our colleague and collaborator James Taylor, a professor of biology and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, died on April 2, 2020. James was one of the creators and PIs of the Galaxy Project, which is among the most widely used platforms in open bioinformatics. The Galaxy community has created a tribute page for James.

The 2020 Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020), which brings together the BOSC and Galaxy communities, will take place online–more info here. The online meeting will still be held July 18-21. Registration will open in a few weeks, and fees will be lower than for an in-person meeting. Abstract submission will open soon and will close April 30th. We will follow the usual submission and review processes.

In light of the current outbreak, we urge everyone to avoid travelling if possible, in order to slow the rate at which the virus spreads to vulnerable people. You may have read that the BCC (BOSC+Galaxy) committee is delaying registration whilst considering the best options.

OBF has been selected as a Google Summer of Code mentor organisation for the 5th consecutive time! We are proud to be hosting over 13 projects from various sub-organisations that aim to promote open science. This year OBF’s application was led by Sarthak Sehgal, Kai Blin, Yo Yehudi, and Michael Crusoe. Last year, GSoC 2019, was another good year with five students successfully completing their projects.

We are currently accepting applications for the first application round for the OBF Travel Fellowship 2020 . This fellowship aims to promote the conference/event participation of attendees who advocate and present their work related to open-source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community.

During the public OBF Board Meeting held on December 17, 2019, elections were held for five Board members whose terms were about to expire. All five stood for re-election to the Board, though with some changes of officers: Hilmar Lapp: stepped down after 8 years as President of the Board; elected to At-Large seat. Peter Cock: elected as President of the Board. Heather Wiencko: elected as Treasurer, replacing previous Treasurer Peter Cock.

Contact Before applying, please read our documentation on information that GSoC contributors should know and guidelines we expect you to follow.

Google Summer of Code 2022 Project Ideas Shortcut to project ideas: Configurable feature visualization to improve the user experience and performance of the feature viewer Space- and time-efficient data format for mass spectrometry data (OpenMS) Efficient data layout for mass spectrometry data (OpenMS) GPU support for Toil-CWL-Runner (UCSC/CWL Project) Improving automated wrapping of C++ code in Python (OpenMS/autowrap) Migration of Journal

Two awardees were chosen during the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship program, which closed on December 1, 2019. The program, which started in 2018, provides some travel funding to selected applicants who, by attending events in open source / open science, will help to promote diversity in the community.

Biopython 1.76 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. Coming relatively soon after our last release, the timing is linked to the official end of life for Python 2, and a focus hereafter on Python 3. We intend this to be our final release supporting Python 2.7 and 3.5. Focusing on Python 3.6 or later will let us take advantage of new functionality and syntax, and simplify our code base and testing.