The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has announced grants totaling $16 million in support of open source software projects that are critical to biomedicine and initiatives designed to advance diversity and inclusion in the open source field.

As part of the fourth cycle of its Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program, CZI awarded thirty-five grants totaling $11.1 million to fund maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for tools widely used in biomedical imaging, genomics, cell biology, bioinformatics, and other fields. Funded projects include "Improving Computational Methods for High-throughput Sequence Data Analysis," "Papyri: Better Documentation for the Scientific Ecosystem in Jupyter," and "scvi-tools: Enabling Probabilistic Analysis for Single-Cell Genomics."

CZI also awarded a total of $4.9 million in support of fourteen initiatives to advance the participation, retention, and leadership progression of people from backgrounds systemically underrepresented in scientific open source. Supported projects include "Advancing an Inclusive Culture in the Scientific Python Ecosystem," "Enhancing Diversity in Computational Mass Spectrometry," and "Industry Open Source Diversity Genomics Internship Program."

"Open source software for biomedical research is a critical component of an open, reproducible, and verifiable scientific ecosystem, and scientists across the globe rely on open source software to carry out their research," said CZI head of science Cori Bargmann. "We’re proud to expand our cohort of grantees, and also help the open source projects we support advance diversity and inclusion in their communities."

(Photo credit: Jingchun Zhu)