- The funding will support open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research
- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative staff will support awarded projects by connecting open source software developers to each other
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced $5 million in funding to support open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research. The grants will support software maintenance, growth, development and community engagement for over 40 critical open source tools says CZI. It will invite applications during two additional cycles, with the second round opening on 17th December of 2019 and the third round in June 2020.
Cori Bargmann, CZI Head of Science, said, “Open source software accelerates the work scientists carry out each day, whether it’s searching a genome sequence for a disease gene, tracking a disease outbreak, or counting cells in a microscope image. Scientists are only as good as their tools, and we’re thrilled to support open source projects that will benefit the entire scientific community and help every scientist be a better scientist.”
Funding between $50,000 and $250,000
Applications can request funding between $50,000 and $250,000 in total costs. CZI will be considering two categories of projects. The first one is domain-specific software for analysing, visualising and working with the specific data types that come up in biomedical science. Second type of project CZI will be looking at is based on developing foundational tools and infrastructure that will enable a variety of downstream software across several domains of science and computational research.
Connect open source software developers
The selected proposals consist of a total of 42 open source projects. It will include tools for visualising, analysing, and managing data for research areas such as genomics, structural biology, cell biology, neuroscience. The CZI staff will also support awarded projects by convening grantee meetings and connecting open source software developers to each other, technical experts, and scientists, which will include other CZI-funded grantees and members of the scientific community.
