This Chan Zuckerberg Initiative offers support for software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for critical open source tools for biological research.

The Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) programme is provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in partnership with The Kavli Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

Open source software is critical to modern scientific research, advancing biology and medicine while providing reproducibility and transparency. This programme, now in its sixth cycle, aims to support software tools that are essential to biomedical research, have previously demonstrated impact, show potential for continued improvement and expect to deliver added value to the biomedical research community through the proposed activities. CZI is looking to support software tools across a broad range of biomedical fields, including (but not limited to):

• Imaging
• Single-Cell Biology
• Neuroscience
• Bioinformatics
• Genomics
• Structural Biology
• Clinical Biology
• Infectious Disease
• Data Visualisation
• Data Analysis, Machine Learning and AI
• Data Management and Workflows

Applications for two broad categories of open source software projects will be considered in scope:

Domain-specific software for analysing, visualising and otherwise working with the specific data types that arise in biomedical science.

Foundational tools and infrastructure that enable a wide variety of downstream software across several domains of science and computational research. To be eligible, foundational tools must have demonstrated impact on some area(s) of biomedical research.

Proposals supporting multiple open source software projects are encouraged, as are those currently funded from the five previous cycles to continue or build on the previously funded work.

Letters of Intent must be submitted by the deadline of 17 October 2023 (17:00 Pacific Time).

Applications can be submitted by US and non-US non-profit and for-profit organisations, public and private institutions (eg colleges, universities, research institutes, hospitals, laboratories and companies), units of state and local government, companies, and eligible agencies of the federal government. Applications are welcome from any country, provided the proposed work is compliant with the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) programme.

Applicants can request funding of between $50,000 and $200,000 total costs per year for two years (inclusive of up to 15% for indirect/overhead costs).

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