New OHI publication in PeerJ

by Ning Jiang

We are proud to announce our new publication in the open-access online peer-reviewed journal PeerJ:
‘Best practices for assessing ocean health in multiple contexts using tailorable frameworks’.

From our experience leading and supporting eleven completed assessments, in this paper we discuss how the Ocean Health Index framework can be tailored for use in different contexts and we identify four best practices for conducting assessments using any integrated framework. The best practices are general enough to be used in any assessment process, but are also accompanied by specific guidance and examples from assessments using the Ocean Health Index framework.

These best practices can be applied beyond Ocean Health to all open science projects. We stress that the process of conducting assessments can be as valuable as the final results and that any assessment process must be transparent about which decisions were made and why, reproducible through access to detailed methods and computational code, repeatable via the ability to modify methods and computational code, and easily communicated to wide audiences. When assessments can easily build from past approaches, the more time and resources can be directed towards management action.

Citation: Lowndes JSS, Pacheco EJ, Best BD, Scarborough C, Longo C, Katona SK, and Halpern BS. Best practices for assessing ocean health in multiple contexts using tailorable frameworks. 2015. PeerJ 3:e1503; DOI 10.7717/peerj.1503

See other Ocean Health Index Publications.