Open Source for the Life Sciences 2026

The 2026 call of Open Source for the Life Sciences (OS4LS) is closed: letters of intent were due on 8 June 2026 and full applications on 21 July 2026, and the official page announces no future call. OS4LS is the first call of the Open Source for Science Fund, run by Renaissance Philanthropy, and it funds two-year grants of up to US$250,000 or US$1 million (about ₹2.38 crore or ₹9.5 crore) for open source software used in life-sciences research. Organisations from any country, including India, can apply, and the process is online, so use this guide to prepare for a future call.

What the program offers

There are two tracks:

• Track 1, Domain-specific Tools: up to US$250,000 in total over two years (up to US$125,000 a year), for tools that represent, analyse or visualise biological data within a specific discipline.
• Track 2, Foundational Libraries and Ecosystem Initiatives: up to US$1,000,000 in total over two years (up to US$500,000 a year), for core libraries used across several domains, or coordinated work across up to five related projects.

Indirect costs are capped at 10% of direct costs and count towards the track maximum. Allowable costs include staff salaries, hackathons and sprints, outreach, cloud and storage, AI/ML infrastructure such as API tokens and model hosting, cross-project coordination and travel to maintainer meetings. Grantees also join a cohort of peer maintainers and funders, are invited to convenings with travel covered by the Fund, and get access to its tools such as software mention tracking.

Priority areas are large-scale data analysis and AI-driven workflows: curating data for model training, benchmarks and standards for agentic workflows, performance work including hardware acceleration, and interoperability. Out of scope are early prototypes, AI-assisted rewrites of legacy tools with no users, proprietary software, hosting infrastructure for repositories or databases, plain maintenance, building new AI models and generating new datasets.

Who can apply

Applicants must be organisations, not individuals: non-profits, for-profit companies, universities, hospitals, labs and government units are listed. The software must have an open source licence and a public code repository, and the codebase must be mature with real adoption in the life sciences. The principal investigator must be a core maintainer or designated representative of the project, with the core team's agreement. Independent projects need an affiliated organisation or a fiscal sponsor (the page names NumFOCUS and Code for Science & Society), arranged by the full-proposal deadline. Any country may apply, provided the work complies with US law, including sanctions, export rules and the anti-corruption law, as well as local law.

An Indian bioinformatics company, institute or lab that maintains a widely used open source tool is a realistic applicant. A solo developer with a new tool is not, unless a sponsor hosts the project.

How to apply

1. Submit a short letter of intent through the application portal: applicant and host details, title, summary, value to life-science researchers, a landscape analysis (including proprietary alternatives and use of AI), project repository links, your track, and the PI's involvement. No full budget is needed at this stage.
2. A subset of applicants is invited to submit a full application with activities, milestones and deliverables, a full budget with justification, key personnel, recent institutional and financial support, project metrics, an evaluation strategy and institutional sign-off.

A practical tip: start collecting your adoption evidence now, such as downloads, citations and contributor activity, because reviewers use them.

How applications are judged and what happens next

Expert reviewers score existing impact (scientific adoption, user growth, citations), quality (team, governance, contributor diversity, roadmap, documentation, activity trends), feasibility (clear plan, budget fit, sustainability) and the value of the proposed work. There is no set number of awards, and reviews are confidential. In 2026 the portal opened on 11 May, invitations went out on 23 June, and the earliest decisions were due in October with a project start from 1 December 2026.

About the Open Source for Science Fund

It is a multi-donor initiative run by Renaissance Philanthropy, with seed funding from Biohub and Wellcome and support from the Kavli Foundation. It follows the Essential Open Source Software for Science programme, which ran six cycles, deployed US$58 million and backed more than 230 projects.

Things to check before you apply

• Grantees must file annual reports with adoption metrics, and some may be made public.
• Submitted information is not confidential and may be shared with reviewers and funding partners.
• Awards come with grant conditions from Renaissance Philanthropy, shared at notification.
• Indian organisations receiving foreign money should check FCRA, FEMA and tax treatment with an adviser.