Balancing Openness, Usability, and Community in Public Health Data

For over fifteen years, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) has provided data, evidence, and tools to help communities understand health and advance health equity. CHR&R data are used by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and state and local public health departments across US contexts. In response to funding loss and long-standing concerns about transparency and sustainability, CHR&R has transitioned its measure calculation system from a closed, proprietary SAS environment to an open-source R repository on GitHub. This Repository Showdown demonstrates how the CHR&R Measure Calculations repository supports open knowledge exchange while remaining usable for a diverse applied public health audience, and how code, documentation, versioning, and archival practices advance FAIR principles, preserve methods over time, and support trust and reuse.