UKRN Open Research Primers

The UKRN primers introduce different aspects of open research, intended for a broad audience: 

The Turing Way

The Turing Way is a handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. It is structured as a series of guides, each containing chapters which cover best practices, guidance and recommendations.   

The Turing Way is not meant to be read from start to finish. Start with a concept, tool or method that you need now in your current work. Browse the different guides that make up the book or use the search box to search for whatever you would like to learn about first. 

The Turing Way (online handbook) 

The Turing Way (GitHub) 

Open Science: a practical guide for PhD students

A UCL-produced UK guide to Open Science for PhD students, based on the original French version produced by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. 

This guide is designed to accompany you through your research, from developing your academic approach to the dissemination of your results. It provides a set of tools and best practices that can be directly implemented and is aimed at researchers from all disciplines. 

Open Science: a practical guide for PhD Students 

Open Science Framework (OSF) Guides

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a platform that supports open and reproducible research in a number of ways. 

There are a number of guides available which you may find useful: 

Create a data management plan 

A data management plan helps ensure that your data remains usable to both you, your collaborators, and other researchers beyond the end of your project.  

How to make a data dictionary 

A data dictionary is critical to making your research more reproducible because it allows others to understand your data. The purpose of a data dictionary is to explain what all the variable names and values in your spreadsheet or dataset really mean. 

Sharing research outputs 

OSF encourage sharing of all data, materials, and software code whenever possible. The likelihood that sharing any particular research output will contribute to the benefit of a field depends on many factors including how complete it is, how completely it is documented, where it is stored, and how it is shared. 

Sharing data 

The OSF is streamlined to facilitate data sharing. This guide explains the process from a new user perspective, assuming minimal experience with the OSF. 

UK Research Integrity Office Open Research Resources

The UK Research Integrity Office has many resources relating to Open Research and related questions regarding research integrity. 

 

Research Data Scotland

Research Data Scotland is a not-for-profit charitable organisation created and funded by the Scottish Government, and a partnership between leading universities and public bodies. RDS works with researchers, analysts and policymakers to make it easier for researchers to access public sector data for the benefit of public good.

Software Sustainability Institute

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) is dedicated to improving software in research and sets itself the ambitious goal of transforming academic culture by establishing the principle that reliable, reproducible, and reusable software is necessary across all research disciplines.
 
The SSI has guides for researchers working with software. These guides aim to raise awareness of software used or written as part of research, especially covering issues about licensing data and software, citing, using, crediting and contributing to other people’s software. To explore SSI guides, click here.