The Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS) is a secure, permanent global repository of ocean research, operations, data/information management and applications methodologies. The OBPS has a vision of a future where there are agreed and broadly adopted methods across ocean research, operations and applications. As such their mission is to sustain an evolving system which fosters collaboration, consensus building, and innovation by providing coordinated and global access to best practices and standards across ocean sciences and applications.

The Ocean Best Practice System supports the entire ocean community in sharing methods, developing best practices and capacity development in their use. Best practices are created by the community for the community. As we move towards a more global vision of ocean-observing, efficient and consistent monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean is essential. These need common methods for interoperability and reproducibility.

Some of the many benefits of adopting best practices include:

• They allow for more efficient use of time
• Improved systems interoperability
• Collaborative opportunities
• Data comparability and collatability
• Greater trust in data
• Streamline regulatory approval

In compliance with H2020’s Open Research Data Pilot (ORDP), all TechOceanS Data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) and TechOceanS has also aligned its use of data and metadata with the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). TechOceanS researchers are encouraged to always first check OBPS to see whether it is appropriate for their data and if so to use it as the preferred repository. TechOceanS contributions to the OBPS Repository can be found here.

To complement their searchable online repository the OBPS has many additional capacities such as providing training, equipping task teams, and facilitating workshops. One such workshop, The Ocean Practices: OBPS Workshop VI is taking place throughout October. This global virtual event will host plenaries on 5, 6, and 19 October 2022. Working Group sessions on diverse themes will meet throughout the month of October.

The OBPS Workshop engages the ocean research and applications community in the creation and use of best practices. It draws on the experience of OBPS user groups and stakeholders, provides a place to share this experience, and an opportunity to provide feedback on how the system should evolve to better fulfil the community vision, mission, and needs. The workshop will produce a set of documents on community-specific and general recommendations for community service, OBPS development, and for expanded community engagement.

There are so many exciting sessions to choose from. For all the information on the event and to register click here.