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.

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. Arunav Konwar’s participation at Global Community Biosummit (GCBS), 2019 was supported by this fellowship.

Among the core values shared across the OBF community are inclusiveness and welcoming newcomers to contribute, without discrimination.

The call for OBF travel fellowship to select the next round of awardees is officially open! Please submit your application by filling out this form. Deadline for this round is 1 December 2019 . This fellowship aims to support our community members in attending events that promote open source software development and/or open science in the biological research fields.

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, which was started in 2016, will be making some changes to the schedule. Until now, there have been three application rounds per year, with deadlines April 15, August 15 and December 15. For the next round, we are moving our December deadline two weeks earlier, to December 1, 2019.