While for much of its history since the great famine of the eighteenth century Ireland has been synonymous with mass emigration, the 23 ^rd ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) meeting sailing into the regenerated “Silicon Docks” of Dublin last week was a homecoming of sorts for the annual gathering of the global Bioinformatics community.

**Open is the New Black **While the internet might still be raging over Tim Hunt’s comments about # distractlingsexy gender issues in the lab, and to a lesser extent Lior Pachtor’s recent provocative blog on the “myths” of bioinformatics code availability and licensing, here in Dublin this years BOSC conference was clear as ever about where they stand on both issues.

Boston 2014: More than a (Bioinformatics) Feeling Following from our previous posting on BOSC, our birthday and the BMC Open Data award party in Boston, on top of having to dash between the many great talks and sessions at ISMB, we were kept even busier than usual helping to organize and present in a special Beyond-the-PDF inspired “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF” workshop at the end

Birthdays are always emotional. The GigaScience team are on their way back from the always jam packed ISMB meeting and its satellite SIGs. This year was a particularly event filled one, with our second birthday, the BMC open data award and drinks reception, and our “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF2” workshop all falling during the meeting.

Open Science flourishes at BOSC and ISMB It’s been a busy couple of weeks for GigaScience , with our 1st birthday, publication of a special anniversary print issue sponsored by Aspera, and publication of the (unusually reviewed) Assemblathon2 paper. These all spanned and were coordinated with the ISMB meeting in Berlin, the yearly gathering of the computational biology community.

GigaScience reaches its first anniversary of publication, and achieves several milestones in changing how life science research is published One year on from our launch, we are unveiling new features and functionality at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting at the ICC in Berlin (pictured) this week.

As a project with the aim of revolutionizing data dissemination and use, on top of promoting open-access and open-data, open-source is a key part of the open-science equation, and this week GigaScience has been at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2012 – program here) in Long Beach.

So that’s ISMB over for another year. The worlds computational biologists are now sleeping off their Austrian wine and Sacher Torte hangovers on flights back home, hopefully inspired and brimming with fresh ideas for the next year. On the whole it seemed a productive and positive meeting, and whilst personal perspectives always differ depending on the tracks attended, there did seem to be several recurring themes.