The Open Science Community for Electron Microscopy (OSC-EM) has been working for more than a year on developing interoperable standards for EM data. OpenEM has been a major contributor to this effort, along with other partners at the INSTRUCT Image Processing Center, EMPL-EBI, and other researchers.
Recent updates on OSC-EM were presented at the 2025 Scipion for Facilities Workshop and the ETH Domain Data Stewardship Community Event.
Recent developments include
- A new general-use schema suitable for material science
- The material science metadata extractor, supporting .emd and .prz metadata
- The life science extractor, supporting SerialEM, EPU, and Tomo5
- The new ‘processing’ section for single particle CryoEM (with Scipion support under development)
The OSC-EM format is used for all data ingested with OpenEM. If you are interested in more information or want help using OSC-EM on your microscope, get in contact with us through the OSC-EM mailing list or start a discussion on our github organization.
Slides are available from both workshops: