A Resource On Data Practices: The Turing Way

The Turing Way is a book (https://book.the-turing-way.org/) and community on reproducible, ethical and inclusive data science, spanning multiple disciplines and fields. The Turing Way forms a space where people from various backgrounds can come together as a community to exchange ideas and best practices around reproducible data science. This paper highlights the recent review and update of the Research Data Management Chapter in The Turing Way.

The Research Data Management (RDM) chapter has been a cornerstone of The Turing Way book since the book’s inception in 2019. Over the past five years the content of the RDM chapter has grown and new sections on data curation, data cleaning, finding data, persistent identifiers, and software management plans have been added. The Turing Way Book has also become more inclusive of qualitative research, tailoring the information more towards the needs and challenges of qualitative researchers.

The maintenance of The Turing Way book, including the Research Data Management chapter, is centered around community participation and iterative additions to the existing content. Through collaborative and iterative contributions, the project explores the collection, stewardship, and ethical use of data, and empowers others to do the same. The ways that the community and the content of the handbook are managed is therefore an example of how distributed academic collaboration and dissemination can take place, fostering collective knowledge-building and careful review of content in an era of disruption and misinformation.