We're delighted to share that our Director, Neil Chue Hong, is serving on the Scientific Advisory Board for the newly launched Open Source for Science Fund, a major new philanthropic initiative dedicated to sustaining and evolving the open source software stack that underpins science.

Seeded with $20 million in anchor funding by Biohub and Wellcome, the fund launches at a critical moment. Every major scientific breakthrough of the past two decades has depended on open source software, but as scientific practice races toward AI-driven discovery, the open source infrastructure and the maintainer communities who keep it alive remain systemically underfunded and not yet designed for AI-native use.

The fund aims to change that, by pooling philanthropic, public, and industry capital into shared infrastructure for grantmaking, enabling funders to act collectively at a scale no single organisation can achieve alone.

The inaugural Request for Applications, Open Source for the Life Sciences, is now open, with two funding tracks:

• Domain-specific tools: grants of up to $250,000 for software tools with demonstrated adoption in the life sciences.
• Foundational libraries and ecosystem initiatives: grants of up to $1,000,000 for broadly used infrastructure-level libraries and cross-cutting ecosystem efforts, with particular attention to AI readiness and interoperability.

Letters of intent are being accepted from 11 May 2026. Find out more and apply at os4science.org.