German BioImaging – Gesellschaft für Mikroskopie und Bildanalyse e.V. (GerBI) shares new transitional phase of the Open Microscopy Environment (OME)

German BioImaging – GMB e.V. (GerBI) is pleased to announce its support of the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) during its transition phase. Jean-Marie Burel and GerBI’s technical director Josh Moore,longstanding members of OME’s project management team, continue to provide guidance as founding leader Jason Swedlow steps down. Joining them in the interim leadership team are GerBI Chair Stefanie Weidtkamp-Peters, Virginie Uhlmann, and Matthew Hartley, ensuring strong representation of the GerBI community in OME’s global governance and ongoing open-source initiatives (forum.image.sc link; openmicroscopy.org).

Impact on GerBI and the GerBI community
This development presents a timely and significant opportunity for GerBI and the GerBI community:

• GerBI will assume a more visible role within OME’s governance and standards-setting ecosystem, aligning imaging facilities, research institutions and infrastructure initiatives with the evolving OME roadmap.
• Through GerBI’s strong network of core facilities and imaging infrastructures across Germany, we are well-placed to act as a bridge between OME’s international strategy and life-science research needs, accelerating the uptake of OME standards, facilitating best-practice training, and contributing practical feedback from facility operations to the global community.

GerBI’s Role in the Transition
GerBI’s role during this phase includes the following key activities:

1. Standards liaison – Acting as a national contact point for GerBI core facilities and their users to engage with OME’s new leadership, ensure effective two-way communication, and integrate the GerBI perspectives into OME’s governance.
2. Community mobilization – Collaborative organization of workshops, tutorials and national trainings focused on OME tools, the emerging OME-Zarr format, and best practices for image-data management. See for example the organization of the next OME2026 community meeting.
3. Infrastructure alignment – Working with the GerBI core facilities, research infrastructures and national initiatives (such as NFDI4BIOIMAGE and I3D:bio) to align local data-management pipelines, metadata strategies, and open-image-data practices with OME specifications, thereby enhancing interoperability and global reuse of imaging data.
4. Advocacy and knowledge exchange – Leveraging our membership in networks like Global BioImaging, partnerships with societies (e.g., BioImaging North America, France BioImaging, RMS) and our national core-facility community to disseminate the transition’s implications, foster global collaborations, and promote German contributions to the OME ecosystem.

Looking Ahead
We invite the GerBI community to join this pivotal phase of OME’s evolution — through participation in the OME2026 community meeting, feedback loops, training events and pilot implementations. Together, we are committed to ensuring that the next era of imaging-data infrastructure is FAIR, interoperable, globally aligned and responsive to real-world facility operations.

We will publish upcoming dates, training formats and participation options on our website.

Contact
For further information, please contact:

Joshua Moore, Technical Director
German BioImaging – Gesellschaft für Mikroskopie und Bildanalyse e.V.

Email: joshua.moore@gerbi-gmb.de