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# OBF Newsletter May 2020

TL;DR - BCC (BOSC + GCC) will be virtual, and [abstracts are due by 8 May](https://www.open-bio.org/events/bosc/submit/). Read on for updates on the OBF travel awards, eLife Sprint, Open Life Science, citizen science, GSoC, and code review in published scientific papers.

## OBF News

### OBF Travel Fellowships

COVID-19 movement restrictions threw a spanner in the works for many people's travel plans. For the recent round of travel fellowships, [we expanded the fellowships to cover virtual conference fees](https://www.open-bio.org/2020/03/13/obf-travel-fellowships-update-in-light-of-the-coronavirus-covid-19-%ef%bb%bf/), headsets, high speed internet, and other relevant socially distance conference attendance needs. The names of our successfult fellowship awardees will be announced soon on the [OBF blog](https://www.open-bio.org/blog/).

You can [apply for the next round of the fellowships now](https://www.open-bio.org/travel-awards/) - the application deadline is October 1 2020.

### BCC news (that's BOSC + GCC!)

BOSC joins together with GCC again this year as ["BCC 2020" (Bioinformatics Community Conference)](https://bcc2020.github.io/), and since it's 100% virtual, it's cheaper yet bigger and better than before, with "east" and "west" timezone tracks for [training](https://bcc2020.github.io/training/) and talks.

#### BOSC Track Abstracts
Abstracts for talks and posters are **DUE BY 8 May 2020!** [Submit yours now](https://www.open-bio.org/events/bosc/submit/).

Registration and more info: [https://bcc2020.github.io/](https://bcc2020.github.io/)

### ☀️ Google Summer of Code
The OBF is delighted to accept [8 new students across a range of open science and open source projects](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/4996161846378496/) for GSoC 2020. Congratulations to all accepted students and applicants for their hard work! Huge thanks to our org admins Sarthak Sehgal (previously an OBF GSoC student and then mentor), Kai Blin, and Michael Crusoe for taking the time to manage this on behalf of the OBF!

## Community updates

### eLife Sprint

The eLife Innovation Sprint will take place Sep 2–3, 2020 in Cambridge, UK (or online). eLife is a non-profit organisation with the mission to accelerate research communication and discovery. The Innovation Sprint is a collaborative event where developers, designers, technologists, researchers, etc. work together to develop technological solutions and prototypes to change the ways scientific research is done and shared. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is a community partner of the Sprint, and eLife and us would love to see you there– travel support is available for those from under-represented communities. Apply here by May 24: [www.elifesci.org/sprint](http://www.elifesci.org/sprint).

Previous attendees of the sprint include OBF Travel Fellowship Awardee [Anisha Keshavan](https://www.open-bio.org/2018/05/22/saving-science-from-itself-2018-elife-innovation-sprint/) and the OBF GSoC admin Sarthak Sehgal, who is also leading [a project on software citation](https://sprint.elifesciences.org/the-software-citation-project/) at the sprint this year.

### Open Life Science Graduations!

The [Open Life Science](https://openlifesci.org/) program has been running over the last few months, training early career project leaders to be open science ambassadors. [Two projects have already graduated](https://www.youtube.com/c/OpenLifeSci), and the rest will be presenting their open science projects on May 20th at [12:00 UTC](https://arewemeetingyet.com/London/2020-05-20/13:00) and [17:00 UTC](https://arewemeetingyet.com/London/2020-05-20/18:00), which will be [live-streamed on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/OpenLifeSci).

[Read more on the Open Life Science blog](https://openlifesci.org/posts/2020/04/12/final-presentations-youre-all-invited/).

### What is citizen science?!
Citizen science – the involvement of volunteer non-expert contributors – is often grouped under the larger *open science* umbrella. But what exactly is citizen science? A collaborative group of nearly 30 researchers set out to answer this question by having people rate the *citizen sciency-iness* of around 70 different projects!

Based on the answers of over 300 different participants, the group has now released the synthesis of all those ratings, [creating a list of the *characteristics of citizen science*](https://povesham.wordpress.com/2020/05/04/introducing-ecsa-characteristics-of-citizen-science/).

### Open source symptom tracking
Speaking of citizen science: [*Quantified Flu*](https://quantifiedflu.org) is a recently launched open source project that uses citizen science to understand how informative the physiological signals of wearable devices can be to predict infections. The project is looking for contributors of both data and code. Check out their GitHub repository to learn more: https://github.com/OpenHumans/quantified-flu

## Interesting links

### Peer review for code with CODECHECK

The [CODECHECK project](https://codecheck.org.uk) reached a milestone with the publication of its first certificate in the journal Gigascience. These certificates indicate that a team have independently verified that the code and data provided by an author generate the same results as given in the author's manuscript. See [this blog](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/codecheck-certificate/) for further details.

Since then CODECHECK has verified other papers results, including two preprints for COVID-19 modelling from the team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Interested in signing up as a code checker, author, or organisation? Visit [the CODECHECK sign-up page](https://codecheck.org.uk/get-involved/).

### 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](https://github.com/OBF/newsletter/issues/12), or contact Yo Yehudi ([Twitter: @yoyehudi](https://twitter.com/yoyehudi), [Email: [e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])) 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.