FAIR Workflows Meets The Turing Way: A Community Contribution on Persistent Identifiers for Reproducible Research Practices

Implementing FAIR Workflows: A Proof of Concept Study in the Field of Consciousness is a project funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. In this project, DataCite works with a number of partners on providing an exemplar workflow that researchers can use to implement FAIR practices throughout their research lifecycle. This post shares an outcome of the project: a new chapter on persistent identifiers (PIDs) contributed to The Turing Way during the November 2025 Book Dash and was merged into the book in February 2026.

About The Turing Way and the Book Dash

The Turing Way is a community-driven, openly developed handbook for reproducible, ethical, and collaborative research, supported by The Alan Turing Institute. Organized across five guides and a community handbook, it brings together contributors from research, data science, and infrastructure communities to co-create guidance on open and reproducible practices. Its modular structure and openly licensed content have made it a widely referenced resource across the open scholarship ecosystem.

The Turing Way's core mechanism for developing new content is the Book Dash: a week-long collaborative event during which contributors propose, draft, review, and merge chapters. In November 2025, the Implementing FAIR Workflows project team participated in a Book Dash and integrated key outputs from the project into the Turing Book.

Why a dedicated PID chapter

The Implementing FAIR Workflows project has been a venue through which DataCite and partners develop practical guidance for PID and metadata adoption across the research lifecycle. The alignment with The Turing Way was clear from the outset: both initiatives aim to lower the barrier to FAIR practices for working researchers.

A review of the existing handbook showed that “assign a DOI” appeared more than fifty times across multiple chapters, but no single chapter explained what PIDs are, how they work, or how major PID systems — such as DataCite, Crossref, ORCID, and ROR — connect to support open scholarly infrastructure. The project team's contribution had two aims: to provide a single reference point for PIDs, and to cross-link PID and metadata content throughout existing chapters on data repositories, documentation and metadata, the FAIR principles, and citable research outputs, so that recommendations to “use a PID” sit alongside clear, practical guidance on how to do so.

From FAIR Workflows outputs to The Turing Way

Material developed through the FAIR Workflows project was adapted to The Turing Way’s audience and editorial style. The bulk of the content was drafted during the Book Dash, with the following months dedicated to peer review and revision through GitHub pull requests. The result is a new Persistent Identifiers chapter in the Research Data Management section, two new chapters on connection metadata and version management in the Communication guide, and cross-references woven throughout the book.

This contribution would not have reached completion without the thorough review and sustained support of Jim Madge (The Alan Turing Institute) and Esther Plomp (University of Aruba), whose guidance on structure, tone, and technical accuracy shaped the final chapter.

Get involved

The Turing Way is always open to contributions. Researchers, educators, and practitioners are welcome to consult the new chapter, suggest edits, or propose related additions through the GitHub repository. 

We look forward to the wider dissemination and adoption of open and FAIR research best practices through the Turing Way community. From the perspective of the FAIR Workflows project, we also hope to see a more embedded approach to PID implementation throughout the research lifecycle, from which both researchers and research organizations can benefit. 

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This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.