From bgreshake at googlemail.com Tue Nov 18 12:06:04 2025 From: bgreshake at googlemail.com (Bastian Greshake) Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:06:04 -0300 Subject: [Open-bio-l] OBF Newsletter November 2025 Message-ID: *Having trouble viewing this email or looking for a permalink? View this newsletter in your browser .* *This email was sent to the bosc-announce and open-bio-l mailing lists.* OBF Newsletter November 2025 TL;DR: Recapping BOSC 2025, preparing for GSoC 2026, OBF Event awards, new website, and community news! In longer form: OBF News BOSC news BOSC 2025 The 2025 edition of our Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (July 21-22, 2025 as part of ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool, UK and online) was a great success, attracting at its peak around 280 in-person attendees. Over two days, BOSC included two keynote addresses, a thought-provoking panel discussion, and plenty of talks and posters around open science, open source, and open data in bioinformatics. This year, our annual CollaborationFest was also part of ISMB/ECCB , with about 60 people participating to contribute to open source projects. The organising committee wrote a report that is now available on F1000 Research , providing some deeper insights and reflections on BOSC & CollaborationFest. All the videos of the BOSC talks, including the keynotes, have now been released as well. You can watch them on our YouTube channel as well as find direct links in our BOSC 2025 schedule page . BOSC 2026: Save the date In 2026, BOSC will again happen as part of the ISMB conference, taking place on two days between 13?16 July 2026 in Washington, DC, USA. To keep up with BOSC news, please follow us on LinkedIn , Bluesky , Mastodon , and Slack ! (We are no longer on Twitter/X; find out why .) OBF Event Fellowships Our event fellowship, which is aimed at increasing diverse participation and representation at events promoting open science practices around bioinformatics, continues. So far, we supported 9 people in 2025, including 2 people in attending BOSC. *Next deadline: December 1, 2025* The current application period for the OBF Event Fellowship lasts until December 1, 2025, so there is still time to get your application submitted . These fellowships are ideal to support your virtual or in-person participation in conferences related to open source bioinformatics or open science (in-person or virtual), and potentially additional expenses such as travel, lodging, childcare for the duration of the event, small hardware (e.g. a headset or webcam), or high-speed internet. You can read more about applying for an OBF Event Fellowship on our blog , where we also share the experiences of past awardees . GSoC 2026 Call For Projects & co-admins The OBF is planning to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026 and invites community members to contribute project ideas, volunteer as mentors, or serve as co-administrators. The official GSoC 2026 timeline has not yet been released. Based on previous years, the project submission phase is expected to begin in January and conclude in February. For reference, details of previous successful OBF projects can be found here: OBF at GSoC 2022 If you are interested in proposing a project, mentoring, or assisting with administration, please send your project ideas or expressions of interest to: - Email: obf-gsoc-mentors at googlegroups.com - Primary Admin: Sarthak Sehgal (sarthaksehgal00 at gmail.com) A new OBF website Earlier this year, the OBF launched a new website . As part of this move, our website is now also archived through the Rogue Scholar , which ensures that the blog posts will remain part of the long-term scientific record. It also means that our blog posts now have their own citeable DOI that you can find on Rogue Scholar ! Community updates Layoffs at GigaScience The journal GigaScience has been a mainstay in the OBF/BOSC space for 15 years. Beyond being a regular sponsor of BOSCs, the GigaScience team have been a steady presence at BOSCs, from talks and posters to organising birthday parties. As such, the recent news of GigaScience?s owners, BGI, laying off the entire editorial, software and curation team on short notice, has filled us with both surprise and deep disappointment. The larger OBF/BOSC community has written a letter to express their concerns and disappointment , while reflecting on all the achievements. If you would like to sign this letter as well, you can do so by making a pull request here . openSNP has shut down openSNP, the open-source/data platform that allowed donating human genotyping data from 23andMe et al. into the public domain, has shut down in April after operating for 14 years. The team decided to take this step over concerns how the current political forces in the USA could abuse such an open data resource. openSNP co-founder (and OBF board member) Bastian Greshake Tzovaras wrote about his reflections and the reasoning for shutting down now . FOSDEM26, now with Bioinformatics and Computational biology If you are interested in hanging out with Free/Libre/Open source/hardware/culture folk in Brussels on 31st Jan - 1st Feb 2026, then why not submit a talk about what you develop/do/have experienced with open source in bioinformatics for the first ever Bioinformatics and Computational biology DevRoom at FOSDEM26. TL;DR: submit a 5,10, or 20 minute talk that is bio/med + open source related via FOSDEM pretalx, and remember to select ?Bioinformatics and Computational Biology? from the ?Track? field. Deadline is 30th November 2025. FOSDEM is (probably) the biggest gathering of open source folk - it is a free conference held at Universit? Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) over the first weekend of February. It attracts thousands of hackers, open software/hardware enthusiasts, makers, and tech/industry people, and like BOSC, has an exceptional culture of inclusivity and commitment to diversity. Read the full CFP , and join us over at matrix.org or via email at https://framagroupes.org/sympa/info/bioinfo-fosdem Your content needed for the next issue! Tell us about the things that catch your attention in the open source bioinformatics world! If you have an exciting project update, request for feedback, or interesting link, feel free to share it with us on GitHub , or contact Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (Mastodon: @gedankenstuecke at scholar.social , Email: bgreshake at gmail.com ) if you're not sure whether or not your content is suitable for our newsletter. We're looking for content that's primarily open source / science related. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: