News

Join us for updates on OpenEM and other open research data projects:

2025 started off strong for OpenEM, and we’re excited to share our progress with you! In the coming months, we’ll keep you updated on the project’s status and introduce key components in more detail. This month’s focus: the Depositor Service!

Happy 2025! It has now been nearly a year since the EM standards workshop established the Open Science Community for Electron Microscopy (OSC-EM). The technical group has been hard at work in that time. One of my new year’s resolutions is to provide more regular updates to all of you on our progress, as well as invite more people to review and contribute to the burgeoning standard.

This past year has been a whirlwind for the OpenEM project! We wanted to take this opportunity to thank the participants for their hard work, provide some updates on the current project status, and of course wish all of you a Joyeux Noël, Happy Holidays, Frohe Weihnachten, and Buon Anno!

We have completed our website and filled the documentation with initial life. Some components are still under development and their call-up and appearance have not yet been finalised. The documentation for these components will be added at a later date.

OpenEM had a strong showing at the EnhanceR Symposium 2024. This is a great event for Swiss research IT providers, and this year’s theme of ‘Research IT contribution to FAIRness’ was highly relevant to OpenEM’s mission. Slides from Spencer’s show-and-tell presentation are available from zenodo.

According to our timeline, the PoC phase was scheduled to be completed on 20 September. We were able to successfully conclude this phase with a joint workshop for the core team.

We have worked on our project page and added the most important project information. You can now find everything about the project and the members on the page. Technical documentation and instructions will be added over time.

Join us for updates on OpenEM and our sister project, PREMISE! This follows the submission of the project’s intermediate report to the ETH-ORD committee. More information:

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.

Two new positions are now seeking applicants for the OpenEM project!

Spencer Bliven and Alun Ashton will be at the CCP-EM Symposium April 25-27. Please give us your thoughts on OpenEM!

Update: The EMPA position is no longer accepting applicants. Watch this site for upcoming positions.

OpenEM has been featured in a recent article entitled “Making the most of our data”. The article highlights Open Research Data projects at the Paul Scherrer Institute.