The Turing Way: Making Reproducible Research Too Easy Not To Do

Slides from Kirstie's talk at the University of York on 27 October 2020

Abstract: Reproducible research is necessary to ensure that scientific work can be trusted. By sharing data, analysis code and the computational environment used to generate the results, researchers can more effectively stand on the shoulders of their peers and colleagues and deliver high quality, trustworthy and verifiable outputs. This requires skills in data management, library sciences, software development, and continuous integration techniques: skills that are not widely taught or expected of academic researchers. Skills that are unreasonable, in fact, to expect in one individual team member. 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, collaborating in distributed groups, open and transparent communication skills, and effective management of diverse research projects. The Turing Way 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 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, 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 leads the Tools, Practices and Systems Research Programme at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). 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 community co-working calls: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/community-handbook/coworking.html
• Slack: https://theturingway.slack.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/turingway
• Mailing list: https://tinyletter.com/TuringWay