Community-led guides for data science and open research

The Turing Way is an open source and community-led project that aims to open up the potential of data science for everyone. Our project brings together a diverse community of researchers, educators, learners, administrators, and stakeholders from within The Alan Turing Institute, across the UK, and internationally. We have collectively written a web-based book with five guides on Reproducible Research, Project Design, Communication, Collaboration and Ethical Research, as well as a Community Handbook. We seek to provide all the information that researchers need at the start of their projects to ensure that they are conducting research that is ethical, inclusive and easy to reproduce at the end. 

The project started in 2018, funded initially by the AI for Science and Government Strategic Priority Fund, and is led by Kirstie Whitaker, Programme Director of the Tools, Practices and Systems Programme (TPS) at The Alan Turing Institute and, Malvika Sharan, TPS Senior Researcher and lead of the Community Management Team at the Turing. 

Since The Turing Way’s launch in 2019, over 300 contributors have co-authored more than 200 subchapters describing data science practices on reproducible research, communication to diverse audiences, remote and distributed collaboration, data-intensive project design and research ethics. The online guides are accessed by thousands of users each month and have been replicated, cited and built on widely. Our impact is reflected in nearly 20,000 cumulative downloads of The Turing Way resources from Zenodo.  

The Turing Way has influenced inclusive practices at national and international research organisations including The Health Foundation, Library Carpentries and the Office for National Statistics. The project is referenced in the international scoping report on Reproducibility of ‘Scientific Results by the European Union’ and ‘An Emerging Technology Charter for London’ by the Mayor of London. In 2021, The Turing Way was nominated for an OpenUK Award in Sustainability and highly commended by the HiddenRef Award for recognising the importance of hidden labour in academia.