The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. I was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend BioHackathon Europe 2025, held 3–7 November at the Esplanade Resort & Spa in Bad Saarow, near Berlin, Germany.
We thank our community for the excellent keynote speaker suggestions for BOSC 2026. The next phase of our selection process invites you to share any concerns about the suitability of the nominated individuals. Our invited speaker selection process and criteria outline the factors we consider when selecting speakers for BOSC 2026, including characteristics that will exclude a speaker.
BOSC 2026 is planned for July 14-15, 2026, as part of ISMB 2026 in Washington, DC. We invite our community to nominate potential keynote speakers who would be of interest to our community. You may submit as many nominations as you wish. The form may be filled out multiple times. Please submit nominations by December 15, 2025 . Why this matters Keynote talks are always a highlight at BOSC.
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community.
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community.
Biopython 1.86 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This contains about nine months worth of updates, and is our first release with Python 3.14 support. See change-log in the news file (most of the changes are in Bio.Align and Bio.PDB). There have also been a few deprecations and removals of older code.
Sponsoring BOSC Sponsorships from companies and non-profit organizations help to defray some of our costs and enable us to offer free registration for some conference participants. In 2024, thanks to our sponsors’ generous support, we were able to grant free registration to 15 participants, offer honoraria to keynote speakers, and cover other expenses. Interested in sponsoring BOSC? Please contact us at bosc@open-bio.org!
The call for applications for round 3 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 December 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.
BOSC 2026 , the 27th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, will take place July 13-14 or July 15-16 in Washington, DC, as part of ISMB 2026. We hope you will join us in person or online! Since 2000, BOSC has covered all aspects of open source bioinformatics and open science. BOSC 2025 took place July 21-22, 2025 in Liverpool, UK (as part of ISMB/ECCB 2025). Read our BOSC 2025 report on F1000Research!
To begin something is difficult; to keep something going is a different challenge. Even when it is the right thing to do, if it does not yield economic benefit in the short term, it may be difficult to sustain. Open science, including open-source software development and open data, is precisely such an example.
Whether you attended BOSC 2025 or missed it, you can read about it (with lots of photos!) in our report published in F1000Research. We are also pleased to announce that videos of the BOSC 2025 talks are now available on our schedule page, as well as on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!