The Turing Way

An open source, open-collaboration and community-led project for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science

Research areas

Introduction

Reproducible research is work that can be independently verified. In practice, it means sharing the data and code that were used to generate published results – yet this is often easier said than done. The Turing Way is a handbook and a community sharing best practices for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. We work with a diverse community of collaborators and contributors to make data science accessible, comprehensible and effective across different sectors.

Our moonshot goal is to 'make reproducibility too easy not to do'!

A person with a shopping trolley in path that we metphrically describe as the Turing Way. There are route to different shops that are labeled as guide for reproducibility, project design, collaboration, communitycation and ethics.

An illustration about The Turing Way guides. By Scriberia and The Turing Way community. Used under the CC-BY 4.0 License. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.

Explaining the science

Reproducible research is necessary to ensure that scientific work can be trusted. Led by strong advocacy from the research community for open science and research reproducibility, funders and publishers are increasingly requiring that publications include access to the underlying data and analysis code. The goal is to ensure that all results can be independently verified and built upon in future work. This is sometimes easier said than done. Sharing these research outputs means understanding and applying a range of practices, including open science, data management, library sciences, software development, and continuous integration techniques — skills that are not widely taught or expected of academic researchers and data scientists. Furthermore, technical skill alone is not sufficient for making research reproducible and open for all.

Project aims

Launched in 2019 as a lightly opinionated guide to data science, The Turing Way has since expanded into a series of guides on Reproducible Research, Project Design, Communication, Collaboration and Ethical Research. Each guide offers chapters on a range of topics covering best practices, guidance and recommendations. These chapters have been co-authored by contributors who are students, researchers, educators, community leaders, policy-makers and professionals from diverse backgrounds, lived experiences and domain knowledge.

The Turing Way is an open collaboration and community-driven project. The Turing Way's mission is to involve everybody in data science and research infrastructure roles: the developers of the code (research engineers, postdocs and doctoral students), their supervisors and the business team members who coordinate these projects. Everyone who contributes to this book, no matter how small or big their contributions are, is recognised in this project as a contributor and a community member.

Applications

We recognise that the burden of requirements and new skill acquisition can be intimidating to individuals who are new to data science. Therefore the format of The Turing Way chapters is kept modular for the reader to dip in and out of, depending on their level of experience in the various topics. The project will help to answer questions that researchers don't always ask: "How do I ensure that my code's existing functionality doesn't change as I extend the codebase?", "How do I make my project easy for someone else to run?", and many more.

Senior team members – Turing fellows, program directors and managers – will be catered for with key points tailored towards managing reproducible research projects highlighted for each topic covered. The project will build and curate checklists for what can be done to ensure all project outputs are reproducible. A chapter on Binder will be of interest to supervisors who want to regularly review their students' code and will include the technical details of how to set up a BinderHub that will be useful for research software engineers.

To engage industries with these practices and facilitate the adoption of open source, open data and other best practices, The Turing Way Practitioners Hub was launched in 2023. The Practitioners Hub has been hosting partnering organisations and Small to Medium-sized Enterprises from across different sectors. 

Recent updates

The Turing Way book currently hosts 200 live pages across 50 chapters that have been co-created by over 300 contributors.

A recent version of the book can be cited as: The Turing Way Community. (2021). The Turing Way: A handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative research (1.0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5671094

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Overview of resources

The Turing Way guides

The Turing Way hosts chapters on research topics cetegorised across the following community-produced guides:

  1. Guide to reproducible research
  2. Guide to ethical research
  3. Guide to project design
  4. Guide for communication
  5. Guide for collaboration
  6. Community Handbook

Illustrations

Since 2019, we have developed reusable illustrations collaboratively with The Turing Way Book Dash participants using the scribing service of Scriberia. These have been shared for community use on Zenodo and have been downloaded nearly 10000 times to use in different Open Source materials. A new set of illustrations are released after each Book Dash event that can be reused under CC-BY 4.0 license with the appropriate citation: “This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under a CC-BY 4.0 Licence. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807.

Community calls and events

Selected reports

Selected articles

Organisers

Anne Lee Steele

Research Community Manager, The Turing Way | Tools, Practices and Systems

Researchers and collaborators

Dr Emma Karoune

Principal Researcher - Research Community Building | Tools, Practices and Systems

Vicky Hellon

Senior Research Community Manager, Turing-Roche Partnership | Tools, Practices and Systems

Dr Eirini Zormpa

Research Community Manager, AIM RSF Open Collaboration | Tools, Practices and Systems

Dr Christopher Burr

Innovation and Impact Hub Lead (TRIC-DT), Senior Researcher in Trustworthy Systems (Tools, Practices and Systems)

Previous contributors

Contact info

Contact the project lead Kirstie Whitaker, co-lead Malvika Sharan and community manager Anne Lee Steele.

Connect

More ways to connect: bit.ly/turingway

Funders