I attended the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2019) organized this year along with ISMB/ECCB in Basel, Switzerland from July 21st-25th. BOSC 2019 was in multiple ways a lot of ‘firsts’ for me. I was attending my first ISMB/ECCB. It also happened to be my first time in Europe. It was the first time I was putting faces and voices to a lot of names.

At the OBF’s July 2019 public Board meeting (held at BOSC 2019), Malvika Sharan was unanimously elected as a new at-large Board member. Malvika, who earned a PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Würzburg, is a community outreach coordinator at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg. She is passionate about promoting the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in bioinformatics and STEM in general.

On July 25, 2019, the OBF held a public Board meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Organized as a Birds of a Feather session at BOSC 2019, the meeting was open to all attendees at ISMB. All but one of the current Board members were present (Secretary Chris Fields called in), as well as a number of ISMB/BOSC attendees. At the meeting, Malvika Sharan was elected as a new Board member.

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. Applications are reviewed three times a year. Applicants may apply for attending any event that develops or promotes open source development and open science in the biological research community. It doesn’t have to be an OBF-related event, and it can be one that you already attended in the recent past.

As Europe experienced a record-breaking heat wave, BOSC 2019 attendees stayed cool in the Basel Congress Center (and many took breaks by floating down the Rhine). This was the 20th annual BOSC. In 2018, BOSC partnered with the Galaxy Community Conference in GCCBOSC2018;

The July 2019 Open Bioinformatics Foundation Public Board Meeting was held in person, as a Birds-of-Feather during the 2nd day lunch period of the 2019 BOSC.

Dear Biopythoneers, Biopython 1.74 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7. However, it will be the last release to support Python 3.4 which is now at end-of-life.

Note: This is a guest blog post from Angela Muraya, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the Africa Open Science Hardware Summit 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops.

We are pleased to announce the April 2019 OBF Travel Fellowship recipients. The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics.

If you’d like the opportunity to present your work at BOSC 2019 (which will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on July 24-25, the last two days of ISMB/ECCB 2019), now’s your chance! The late round of abstract submission is open, and we will be choosing a few abstracts for “Late-Breaking Lightning Talks” as well as posters. BOSC welcomes submissions about all aspects of open source bioinformatics, open science and open data.

We’re excited to announce that Nicola Mulder will be delivering the keynote at BOSC 2019. Read the abstract below for a taster of the talk to come… Dr Nicola Mulder Due to a history of exploitation and inequitable scientific partnerships, many African researchers are reluctant to fully embrace open science practices.