OME is an international consortium of academic investigators building tools to enable access and sharing of biological image data. OME releases Bio-Formats, an image format translation library, and OMERO, a software platform for the visualisation, management and analysis of image data recorded by microscopes and high content screening systems.

OME software is completely open source, and provides a single, standardized access point for >70 image types, and lets researchers use whatever analysis tools they like to process and study whichever images they use. These tools transform the way that researchers can store, share and access the vast amount of image data that is now routinely produced in Life Sciences laboratories around the world.

Use of OME tools has a number of advantages:

• the storage, annotation, and archiving of overwhelming amounts of image data and metadata;
• the submission of raw data with scientific papers - as is currently being done by The Journal of Cell Biology - allowing reviewers and readers to assess the quality of the work and explore each other’s data;
• sharing of data with collaborators both near and far, and the application of a wide array of image analysis tools to large image datasets
• in the future, OME tools can serve as the foundation of a central repository for image data from labs around the world, allowing scientists to share pre-existing data and therefore accelerating the development of scientific research tools and methodologies.

Professor Jason Swedlow, one of the world’s top microscopy specialists who leads the OME team, says, “OME is about data sharing and access, and ultimately about transparency and integrity. OME tools allow you to see and interact with image data, judge it for yourself, and communicate your ideas with others.”

For further information on OME, Bio-Formats, and OMERO see the project’s web page http://openmicroscopy.org