Connecting communities through FAIR data – the research data management (RDM) projects NFDI4BIOIMAGE and I3D:bio

Modern bioimaging generates increasingly large, complex and heterogeneous datasets. Making these data accessible beyond the laboratory in which they were acquired requires more than storage: it requires common standards, interoperable infrastructure, practical workflows, and communities that adopt them. In Germany, the NFDI4BIOIMAGE consortium (National Research Data Infrastructure for Microscopy and Bioimage Analysis) and the I3D:bio project (Information Infrastructure for BioImage Data) address this challenge from the national infrastructure to the institutional implementation level. Their shared goal is to make FAIR research data management an integral part of everyday bioimaging practice. NFDI4BIOIMAGE connects researchers, imaging facilities, bioimage analysts, data stewards, infrastructure providers and international initiatives to develop and establish solutions across the bioimage data lifecycle. Activities range from community-driven standards such as OME-Zarr and interoperable metadata approaches to cloud-based image analysis, data publication, training and dedicated research data management support. I3D:bio complements this landscape with a focus on practical institutional workflows, in particular based on the image data management platform OMERO. Through deployment support, best-practice development, training and direct interaction with imaging facilities, I3D:bio has supported institutions in establishing sustainable local bioimage data management infrastructures. The close interaction between both projects illustrates how national coordination and local implementation can reinforce each other. Joint activities around OMERO, metadata annotation, training, data stewardship and community events provide feedback from everyday research practice into infrastructure development while making emerging standards and services directly accessible to researchers. Here, we present this collaborative ecosystem and selected examples of how connecting people, standards, services and data can lower barriers to FAIR and open bioimaging. We argue that sustainable access to imaging does not end at access to instruments: enabling researchers to manage, analyse, share and ultimately reuse the resulting data is an equally important component of open imaging infrastructure.