In this Nature Methods issue, the global microscopy community presented comprehensive efforts to improve reporting and reproducibility of microscopy images. Articles of this issue focused on approaches for reporting metadata, e.g. minimal reporting guidelines (REMBI: Recommended Metadata for Biological Images), and provide practical approaches on how to achieve this. Over 260 community members came together as part of the initiative Quality Assessment and Reproducibility for Instruments & Images in Light Microscopy (QUAREP-LiMi) to establish quality control mechanisms for microscopy instruments and images. This initiative was formed in spring 2020 and consists now of 11 working groups with a variety of activities from developing protocols to measure illumination power to the quality control of metadata. Other articles of this issue presented open-source tools to support tracking and reporting of metadata.

This issue is a must read for any researcher performing microscopy experiments to identify the appropriate resources to report imaging results adequately and to stay up-to-date with movements in the microscopy field.

Bringing microscopy images to the next level