The Turing Way: A how to guide for reproducible research

Kirstie's slides for her talk at the MQ Mental Health Data Science Meeting in Edinburgh on 9 September 2019.

Abstract: Reproducible research is necessary to ensure that scientific work can be trusted. Funders and publishers are beginning to require that publications include access to the underlying data and the 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 data management, library sciences, software development, and continuous integration techniques: skills that are not widely taught or expected of academic researchers. The Turing Way is a handbook to support students, their supervisors, funders and journal editors in ensuring that reproducible research is "too easy not to do". It includes training material on version control, analysis testing, and open and transparent communication with future users, and includes case studies and common "gotchas" for researchers to avoid. This project is openly developed and any and all questions, comments and recommendations are welcome at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way. In this talk, Kirstie Whitaker, lead developer of The Turing Way, will take you on a whirlwind tour of the chapters that already exist, the interactive demonstrations you can use and re-use for your own research, and the directions in which we're continuing to develop. All participants will leave the talk knowing that "Every Little Helps" when making their work reproducible, even in situations where data can not be made publicly available, where to ask for help as they start or continue their open research journey, and how they can contribute to improve The Turing Way for future readers.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) and senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Her work covers a broad range of interests and methods, but the driving principle is to improve the lives of neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and participatory citizen science to educate non-autistic people about how they can better support autistic friends and colleagues. She is the lead developer of The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource to enable more reproducible data science. Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is the chair of the Turing Institute's Ethics Advisory Group, a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. You can find more information at her lab website: whitakerlab.github.io.

Useful links

• The book: https://the-turing-way.netlify.com
• Github repository: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way 
• Contributing guidelines: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• Online Collaboration Cafe outline and schedule: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/master/project_management/online-collaboration-cafe.md
• Gitter chat room: https://gitter.im/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way
• Mailing list: https://tinyletter.com/TuringWay