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.

This post is co-authored by Bérénice Batut, Malvika Sharan, Emmy Tsang, and Yo Yehudi. In 2016, Mozilla launched a program to help grow the skills of people interested in working openly and empower a generation of open-inspired leaders. The program has been through several stages of evolution, from early Working Open Workshops, and eventually to regular twice-yearly cohorts, mentoring project leads from all around the globe.

Dear Biopythoneers, Biopython 1.75 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and is expected to work on the soon to be released Python 3.8. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7.13 v7.1.1 and PyPy3.6.1 v7.1.1-beta0. Note we intend to drop Python 2.7 support in early 2020.

BOSC 2019 BOSC 2019 was a success! We look forward to BOSC 2020 (with GCC2020 as part of the Bioinformatics Community Conference) in Toronto, Canada, July 18-21, 2020. The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has been held annually since 2000. In 2019, BOSC was part of ISMB/ECCB in Basel. See the full schedule of talks, posters and Birds of a Feather meetups.

This is a guest blog post from Aziz Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the ISMB/ECCB and BOSC 2019 meeting in Basel, July 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community.

A record number of people applied for the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship, which closed on August 15, 2019. Out of this great set of applicants, we offered travel awards to three who epitomize the goal of the awards: to promote diversity in the world of open source bioinformatics / open science.