BOSC 2018

BOSC 2018 will take place June 26-27, 2018 (with training days June 24-25 and a CollaborationFest June 28-29) at Reed College in Portland, Oregon as part of the GCCBOSC 2018 bioinformatics community conference co-hosted with the Galaxy Community Conference.

Important Dates

• March 19, 2018: Deadline for submitting abstracts for full talks
• April 10, 2018: First-round authors notified
• April 15, 2018: Deadline for spring round of OBF Travel Fellowships
• May 11, 2018: Early registration ends
• May 17, 2018: Late-breaking lightning talk/poster/demo submission deadline
• May 24, 2018: Late-round authors notified
• June 25-30, 2018: GCCBOSC 2018, Reed College, Portland
• June 25-26: GCCBOSC Training Days
• June 27-28: GCCBOSC main conference
• June 29,30, July 1,2: Collaborative coding at GCCBOSC

Keynote Speakers

The BOSC keynote speakers will be Fernando Pérez (Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of California Berkeley) and Tracy K. Teal (The Carpentries). Additionally, GCC's keynote speaker is Lucia Peixoto.

Why is BOSC partnering with GCC in 2018?

BOSC has been a part of ISMB since its inception, and we greatly value our relationships with the ISCB management and the ISMB community. BOSC 2017, which was part of ISMB/ECCB 2017 in Prague, was an exciting and successful meeting.

Because of our continuing focus on broadening and deepening the BOSC community, we've been exploring ways to reach those in the bioinformatics community who aren’t already part of the audience attracted by ISMB. As part of that exploration, we have looked at other organizations and conferences that have been successful at establishing a strong and growing community of participants. One such conference is the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC).

After much discussion and planning, we'll be participating in a bioinformatics community conference in 2018 that includes both GCC and BOSC. We hope this will help serve the open bioinformatics community in a few ways:

• It creates a conference with an explicit focus on development, support and maintenance of the interoperable software tools and libraries that enable modern scientific research. We believe the only sustainable way to provide the infrastructure needed for high throughput analyses is to build cooperating, open, diverse communities of programmers and biologists. This conference is where we hope to build and deepen this community.

• It includes two dedicated training days by members from both the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Galaxy communities. This enables focused training on useful tools and approaches, making the conference attractive to anyone who wants to expand their skills.

• There will be integrated collaboration days after the conference, merging BOSC Codefest and Galaxy's Developer and User Hackathon Days. We hope the integrated collaboration days following training and the conference talks will allow new and existing members of the community to attend and build working relationships.

• The meeting will be held at a great venue in Portland--Reed College--providing an affordable and fun experience for anyone who wants to attend.

We would like to emphasize that this is an experiment for us and we aren’t looking to sever our strong ties with ISMB. We're planning to evaluate the combined GCC and BOSC experience in 2018 and welcome community feedback on all of these thoughts and plans.

Session Topics

BOSC covers all aspects of bioinformatics and open science software, including (but not limited to):

• Open Science and Reproducible Research
• Open Biomedical Data
• Citizen/Participatory Science
• Standards and Interoperability
• Data Science
• Workflows
• Visualization
• Medical and Translational Bioinformatics
• Developer Tools and Libraries
• Bioinformatics Open Source Project Progress Reports

BOSC Organizing Committee

Chair

• Nomi L. Harris (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Co-Chairs

• Heather Wiencko (Hosted Graphite, Dublin Ireland)
• Brad Chapman (Biopython developer; Harvard School of Public Health)

Organizing Committee Members

• Karsten Hokamp (Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
• Peter Cock (Biopython developer; James Hutton Institute)
• Christopher Fields (National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
• Bastian Greshake (Open Humans)
• Hilmar Lapp (Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB), Duke University)

Review Committee

Kai Blin, Christian Brueffer, Scott Cain, Brad Chapman, Peter Cock, Anamaria Crisan, Gianluca Della Vedova, Christopher Fields, Konrad Förstner, George Githinji, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Nomi Harris, Michael Heuer, Karsten Hokamp, Shaun Jackman, Farah Khan, Hilmar Lapp, Jessica Maia, Herve Menager, Frank Nothaft, Kieran O'Neill, Konstantin Okonechnikov, Lorena Pantano, Surya Saha, Malvika Sharan, Eric Talevich, Morgan Taschuk, Heather Wiencko, Jason Williams, Yo Yehudi

Previous BOSCs

• BOSC has been held yearly since 2000.
• BOSC 2017 was held July 22-23, 2017 in Prague as part of the ISMB/ECCB meeting.
• Information about the first 17 BOSC conferences

Code of Conduct

The GCCBOSC 2018 Code of Conduct can be found here.

Contact Us

• Follow BOSC on Twitter: @OBF_BOSC, #gccbosc
• If you'd like to join the mailing list for BOSC-related announcements, including the call for abstracts and deadline reminders, please subscribe to bosc-announce. This list has low traffic, and your address will be kept private.
• If you have questions about the conference, or would like to volunteer to help out, please contact the organizers at obf-bosc@googlegroups.com.