We asked our community to nominate potential BOSC keynote speakers, and we were pleased with the great suggestions! In the next phase of our process, we’re giving you a chance to let us know if there is anything that makes any of the nominated individuals NOT appropriate as BOSC keynote speakers. Our invited speaker process and rubric gives examples of some possible reasons for exclusion.

We are seeking a diverse list of potential BOSC keynote speakers. We invite you, our community, to nominate people you think would be appropriate (and at least somewhat likely to accept the invitation – for example, it is extremely unlikely that we would get a ‘yes’ from a recent Nobel Laureate). Please submit your nominations here (as many as you like;

Dear Biopythoneers, Our first release of 2024 is now out, sooner than planned as this is purely to revert the removal of the .strand, .ref, and .ref_db attributes of the SeqFeature which was done in Biopython 1.82 without a deprecation period. They are again aliases for .location.strand etc, but now trigger deprecation warnings. See our deprecation policy. We apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you to those reporting this.

Biopython 1.82 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. Our second release of 2023 is now out, albeit way later than we’d all intended.

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.

All are invited to join us (via Zoom) at the OBF’s upcoming public Board meeting.

As of November 21, 2023, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and BOSC will no longer post on Twitter/X. Although in the past it was a useful social medium, it is no longer compatible with our values, as expressed in the OBF Code of Conduct: We are committed to creating a friendly and respectful place for learning, sharing and contributing. All participants in our events and communications are expected to show respect and courtesy to others.

In conjunction with our annual meeting, BOSC, the OBF runs a collaborative event (formerly called CodeFest, short for coding festival, and now called CollaborationFest, or CoFest for short). At these events, participants work together to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases.

BOSC 2024 , the 25th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, took place place July 15-16, 2024, as part of ISMB 2024, in Montréal, Canada and online. BOSC covers open source bioinformatics and open science. The theme for 2024 was Open Approaches to AI/ML; it was reflected in a panel discussion and a talk session. Videos of the talks from BOSC 2024 are available on our YouTube channel.

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2023, round 3, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 December 2023. Applications should be submitted via 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.