Announcing the Open Science Community for EM (OSCEM)

OpenEM strives to follow FAIR principles for all of our data: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. A major part of interoperability between services is describing datasets using a standardized vocabulary shared between the larger electron microscopy community. This means representing data with a well-defined schema or data model, as well as agreeing on an ontology defining the meaning of each piece of metadata.

While some standards are available for electron microscopy data, no single standard covers the full data lifecycle from data collection through publication. As such, a workshop was held at Paul Scherrer Institute on the 22-23 February, 2024, with participants from across the EM community. It included representatives of EM facilities, developers of tools for processing EM data, and members of the large EM data repositories such as EMDB.

As a result of this workshop, the Open Science Community for Electron Microscopy (OSCEM) will draft a standard for representing EM metadata. The standard will include all metadata required for processing an electron microscopy dataset, with additional fields to support important use cases such as depositing data in the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive, EMDB, and PDB. The standard links existing ontologies where possible, but extends these to include the full data lifecycle from data collection through publishing in public repositories.

If you are interested in joining the community, please contact Jose Maria Carazo or Spencer Bliven, or see the workshop event page.