Launched in 2000 and held every year since, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a volunteer-run meeting coordinated by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) that covers open source software development and open science in bioinformatics. Most years, BOSC has been part of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference, but in 2018, and again in 2020, BOSC partnered with the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC). This year's combined BOSC + GCC conference was called the Bioinformatics Community Conference (BCC2020, bcc2020.github.io). Originally slated to take place in Toronto, Canada, BCC2020 was moved online due to COVID-19. The meeting started with a wide array of training sessions; continued with a main program of keynote presentations, talks, posters, Birds of a Feather, and more; and ended with four days of collaboration (CoFest). Efforts to make the meeting accessible and inclusive included very low registration fees, talks presented twice a day, and closed captioning for all videos. More than 800 people from 61 countries registered for at least one part of the meeting, which was held mostly in the Remo.co video-conferencing platform.
Keywords: bioinformatics; online conference; open science; open source.
Copyright: © 2020 Harris NL et al.