The Turing Way
Overview
The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led handbook and global community dedicated to making reproducible, ethical, and collaborative data science practices accessible to all researchers. It was founded in 2019 at the Alan Turing Institute with support from the UKRI Strategic Priorities Fund. What began as a guide to research reproducibility has since expanded into five interconnected guides covering reproducible research, project design, collaboration, communication, and ethical research, alongside a Community Handbook. As of June 2025, the Alan Turing Institute’s direct funding for the project ended. The Turing Way continues as an independent open source project governed by a community-led Steering Committee and Working Groups hosted across different organisations.
Scope
The handbook comprises over 350 chapters contributed by nearly 500 individuals as of 2024, with over 6,000 monthly readers worldwide as of 2024. It is developed entirely in the open on GitHub under a CC BY 4.0 licence and treats its own governance and contribution model as a reusable template for other community projects. In 2023, the Turing Way Practitioners Hub was launched under Innovate UK’s BridgeAI programme, extending the project into industry via cohort-based programmes for small and medium-sized enterprises seeking to adopt open and ethical AI practices.
Relevance to Neuroscience
The Turing Way is domain-agnostic but has strong neuroscience roots. Its founder is trained in neuroimaging, and the handbook routinely references BIDS, DataLad, and the FAIR Principles as exemplars of good practice. It serves as a cross-cutting methodological resource across the open neuroscience ecosystem, particularly on reproducibility, data management, and research software engineering.
Connections
- Aligned with: FAIR Principles
- Archived at: Zenodo
Resources
- https://book.the-turing-way.org
- https://book.the-turing-way.org/foreword/governance (governance structure)
- https://book.the-turing-way.org/foreword/community (community roles, confirms 2019-2025 ATI hosting)
- https://github.com/the-turing-way/the-turing-way
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3233853 (citable Zenodo record)
- https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/turing-way (ATI project page, confirms June 2025 funding end)