News
DTES RESEARCH
ACCESS PORTAL
The DTES RAP in the Scholarly Communication classroom
Heather O’Brien
Associate Professor
UBC iSchool
The Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP) facilitates access to academic- and community-generated research materials relevant to the DTES community. It can also serve as a teaching and learning tool for thinking about the scholarly research process.
Between September and December 2020, I taught a course on Scholarly Communication and Publishing at the UBC iSchool. I worked with the Making Research Accessible initiative (MRAi) Steering Committee over the summer of 2020 to incorporate the DTES RAP as a case study in the course. Specifically, I designed online discussions for five weeks of the course to help us unpack different topics using the DTES RAP as a lens. We began with an overview of the legacy of research in the DTES to situate the DTES RAP in a broader conversation about open and ethical research.
The DTES RAP as a lens for scholarly communication
As university students and teachers, we take for granted the extreme privilege of being able to download research articles and books and use them in our work. Physical access to research materials is a barrier for many people due to publisher paywalls. But so is meaningful use. Research papers are often lengthy, filled with jargon and can seem abstract from daily life and issues. These issues are compounded in communities like the DTES that have experienced research as an extractive process that has limited impact on people’s daily lives.
Applying the DTES RAP to topics in scholarly communication
When we consider why the DTES RAP came to be and the challenges it was designed to address, we see that it is more than a tool for storing and accessing information. Over the term, the students and I used the DTES RAP to reflect on:
- How scholars from different disciplines conduct and publish research, and how we might apply knowledge of disciplinary practices to incentivize scholars to share research.
- The many barriers (physical, literacy, technological, etc.) that prevent research from being accessed and used.
- The ways in which communities are represented in published research. Specifically, we compared how traditional library classification systems, such as the Library of Congress, and the DTES RAP topics describe underrepresented groups and issues, e.g., “substance abuse” versus “substance use.”
- The role of community-generated research in scholarly communication, and the need to redefine notions of expertise to include those with lived experience.
- The need to move beyond the number of times a paper has been cited as a measure of the quality of research and to, instead, think about societal impact.
Throughout the term, we explored other initiatives, such as the Community Scholars Program, that are approaching access to information in different, but complimentary, ways to the DTES RAP.
Conclusion
Using the DTES RAP as a case study allowed us to apply lecture and reading materials to a living example. In doing so, we could appreciate the opportunities and complexities involved in bringing university and non-academic communities together. It reinforced the many social, technical and political factors that shape scholarly communication, and the need for community-engaged work in librarianship.
Heather O’Brien is an Associate Professor at the School of Information, University of British Columbia. She is the Principal Investigator of the Supporting Transparent and Open Research Engagement and Exchange (STOREE) Project and a Member of the Making Research Accessible Initiative (MRAi) Steering Committee.
—
Do you have questions or feedback about this article? Do you have an idea for the news section? Please reach out to Community Engagement Librarian Nick Ubels at nick.ubels@ubc.ca
