We’re pleased to publicly announce that we aim to video record all the talks at BOSC 2014, and the panel discussion, to be made freely available online after the conference. This is on an opt-out basis, and thus far none of our speakers have declined to be filmed. Last year we managed to record many of the talks - including both keynotes, which you can watch via the YouTube links on the BOSC 2013 Schedule.

This is a belated notice that the OBF mailing lists are down due to a server failure. Posting a tweet is easier than writing a blog post, please follow @OBF_news for updates. We have a complete back up and running as a virtual machine hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which should become live by Monday pending DNS updates etc.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.64 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, 3.3 and also the new 3.4 version. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.3, and Jython 2.7b2.

Hi all, I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of OBF’s Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) students: Sarah Berkemer - " Open source high-performance BioHaskell " (Mentors: Christian Höner zu Siederdissen, Ketil Malde) ( blog) Loris Cro - " An ultra-fast scalable RESTful API to query large numbers of VCF datapoints " (Mentors: Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal &

Bioinformatics Open Source Codefest, July 9 and 10th in Boston, now with sponsored food and drinks!

To encourage more student presentations at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), this year we’re waiving the registration fee for accepted student presenters.

Are you a university student and interested in spending the summer developing open-source bioinformatics software? (Good! Keep reading.) On Monday, March 10, Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) will begin accepting student applications to work with mentoring organizations like OBF.

Call for Abstracts for the 15th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB 2014.

Open Bio is officially a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014! See Google’s official announcement for more details on what this means in general. What’s next? Google’s GSoC timeline lays out what we need to do as a mentoring organization during the coming weeks. Students can apply March 10–21 through the official GSoC 2014 website to work with OBF.

On Friday, OBF applied to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. The core of our application to Google is our list of project ideas and our team of mentors supporting them. (We also have a separate page for general information about GSoC and OBF’s involvement.) As another way to interact with potential GSoC students, we’ve created a Google Plus page for OBF and a G+ community for OBF’s GSoC activities.

Google Summer of Code is on again for 2014, and OBF is once again applying as a mentoring organization. Participating in GSoC as an organization is very competitive, and we will need your help in gathering a good set of ideas and potential mentors. Since OBF is an umbrella organization covering several member projects, most of these GSoC ideas will likely be associated with a specific Bio* community.