Open Bioinformatics Foundation

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non-profit, volunteer-run group that promotes open source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. Membership in the OBF is free and open to anyone who wants to help promote open source or open science in a biological field.
OBF runs the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).
BOSC 2026, the 27th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, took place July 14-15 in Washington, DC, as part of ISMB 2026. BOSC 2027 will be part of ISMB/ECCB 2027 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are two application rounds per year, in April and October.
Posted on November 6, 2026 | Nomi Harris
The OBF Event Award program has successfully completed its first 10 years. Initially called the Travel Fellowship program, the Event Award was launched in March 2016 with the goal of increasing diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics or open science by providing financial support to selected applicants to help them attend these events. The program was conceived as a way to “put our money where our mouths were”, as a concrete way to help increase diversity and representation in the open source / open science bioinformatics community. In April 2016, the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code donated USD$18,125 to fund the program.
Posted on October 7, 2026 | Sneha Murmu
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. Sneha Murmu, a Scientist at ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (ICAR-IASRI), was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 25th International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB/ISCB-APAC 2026).
Bioinformatics is changing rapidly as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intertwined with biological data analysis. I had an opportunity to experience this transition closely while attending the 25th International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB 2026) and the 1st ISCB Asia-Pacific Conference (ISCB-APAC 2026) in Penang, Malaysia, from 14-17 September 2026. My participation was supported by an Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship. Coming from an agricultural bioinformatics background, I approached the meeting with a particular question in mind: how can some of these emerging computational approaches be translated to agricultural research?
Posted on October 3, 2026 | Moaaz Khokhar
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. Moaaz Khokhar, a PhD Candidate at Koç University, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2026).
I attended the 25th European Conference on Computational Biology in Geneva, held from 31 August to 4 September 2026. I work on predicting allosteric sites in proteins: regions where binding can influence activity elsewhere in the molecule. This makes the relationship between sequence, structure and function a practical problem in my research.
Posted on September 30, 2026 | Disha Tandon
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. Disha Tandon, an ARISE2 fellow at EMBL-EBI, UK, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the NFDI4LS-Integrative Bioinformatics conference.
CC-BY-SA Mary-Ann Ebeling
Recently I attended the Nationale Forschungsdaten Infrastuktur for Life Sciences (NFDI4LS) - Integrative Bioinformatics conference organised at the Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany. Thanks to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation’s Event Award, I got to take my work beyond my desk and share it with a diverse community active in research data management.
Posted on September 30, 2026 | Jeremy Fan
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. Jeremy Fan, an independent researcher, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2026.
I want to thank the BOSC committee and all the organizers at the conference. At BOSC 2026, I presented BioFmt, attended talks on AI-assisted work, and spoke with researchers building small, specialized tools. Those conversations were a chance to connect my own experience with what others were working on. A recurring theme for me was how we check the software and scientific outputs that are becoming easier to produce.
Posted on September 4, 2026 | peterjc
We will be holding an online OBF Public Board meeting on Tuesday 15 September 2026, at 15:00 UTC (8am PDT, 11am EDT, 4pm BST, 5pm CEST), on the Zoom platform.
Under the OBF bylaws we must give at least 10 days notice of a public board meeting. This message should also have reached the OBF membership by email - the members mailing list is the membership roll.
OBF is committed to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. The roles and functions of OBF have evolved over the last 20 years, and currently include:
Posted on August 16, 2026 | Nomi Harris
The 27th Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2026, took place July 14-15 as part of Intelligent Systems for Molecular