The conference is held as a single track consisting of presentations, poster sessions and two keynote talks by people of influence in open-source bioinformatics.

[1] Since 2010, an informal two-day "CollaborationFest" (formerly Codefest) has been held directly preceding the conference.

[3][4] National Institutes of Health Associate Director for Data Science Philip Bourne and C. Titus Brown gave keynote talks at BOSC 2014.

[5] BOSC 2016 was organized in Orlando, Florida from July 8–9 before the main ISMB conference.

In 2023 BOSC took place in Lyon, France between July 24-28 as part of the ISMB/ECCB conference.